Product Details

16 FRAMES

Memories of Afterimage

Amitava Nag

First Published

January 2020

Copyright © Amitava Nag, 2020

Amitava Nag has asserted his right under the Indian Copyright Act to be identified as Author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Publisher

Crossed Arrows (An imprint of Doshor Publication), C/2 Ramkrishna Upanibesh, Regent Estate,

Jadavpur, Kolkata 700092

ISBN:  978-81-944429-0-5

Typeset by Debashish Roy Choudhury

Printed and bound in India by S.P. Communications, Kolkata

Dedication

"To my ever-understanding father and oft-inquisitive son -

for their patience, and belief in me,

for helping me to fiercely protect my trust in human imagination, and its power to move images."

Acknowledgement

In any collection of film essays, one of the biggest challenges has always been the procurement of film stills to accompany the articles.  Will all articles carry stills with them? How many stills is sufficient for each article? Questions are more and in the end the decisions end up being dissatisfactory most of the times. In a book like this of sixteen essays with more than a double of that number of films being discussed, the task was arduous. Yet, I must say I am quite lucky. I have been extended help by all concerned and generously.

I take this opportunity to thank Kunal Sen, son of filmmaker Mrinal Sen, for promptly sharing a few pics from his illustrious father’s personal collections. I thank Moinak Biswas, film scholar, professor, filmmaker and a long-time friend not only for providing me with the stills of his film Sthaniya Sambad but for being a support to Silhouette, the film magazine I have been editing since 2001. For the last two decades Moinak-da lends his help and advice every time I approached him with my requests. I am indebted to Nandita Das, actress and filmmaker, Manas Mukul Das and Rima Das, both filmmakers for their help and support. My thanks to the late photographer Sukumar Roy for quite a few stills he kindly shared with me for the purpose of using them in the books I have written and will be writing. I am hugely indebted, as almost always, to Shoma A Chatterji for providing me with stills from her personal collection for several films. She had also been a steadfast support of my writings over the years and kindly agreed to write a foreword for this book.

Many of these articles over a period of time evolved with me, my viewpoints of life, society and politics. My biggest source of intellectual sustenance has always been my interactions with only a handful, but important friends. Shiladitya Sarkar, painter and writer has been the sharpest critical whip and an equally resourceful spring of light and life. My friends at Silhouette Film Society helped me evolve in my halcyon days of youth, they instilled in me a belief that I may try writing on cinema as well.

I am indebted to Sayani Dutta Mitra and Manan Dutta of Doshor Publications for giving my articles a home. Their youthful exuberance and endeavour is worth appreciating. My gratitude to them and my wishes for a bright and a fulfilling future.

At home, for the last two decades, my wife Sudeshna enabled me to engage in writing on cinema by taking care of the small nuances of daily routine. A friend since my university days, I cannot enough, and hence should not try thanking her. That I can still go on writing and discussing cinema and other arts is due to her and my octogenarian father’s silent support.

I also thank all who have wished these articles well over the years and will stand by this collection.

FOREWORD

Amitava Nag is quite a close friend and has been one over a decade though in terms of chronological age, we are distanced by a generation at least. He is as young as my son – if I had had one – and proves that friendship is not limited by age, culture, class or anything else. It is the passion for cinema and writing on it that forms the foundation of this bonding and continues to enrich both our love for cinema.

He is so well-versed in world cinema spanning a considerable space of time and geography and culture, that to write a foreword to his book is perhaps, embarrassing for one who is not well-versed in international cinema beyond a limited point. So, one accepts the process of writing a foreword more as a learning experience than as a critiquing foreword. Amitava’s greatest contribution to writing on cinema is the journal he founded, Silhouette first in print and then as a digital version. The issues combined or taken separately, can easily offer a rich frame of reference to film studies researchers now and in the future. But that is another story.

I am serious when I say that reading the typescript slowly has indeed been a learning experience for me. His perspective is unique and individualistic, dotted with the expertise he has gathered mainly from his vast experience as an avid cinema-watcher than as an academic scholar. And this is certainly not his first book on cinema.

16 FRAMES is an apt title which he explains in his introduction. He traces his evolution into a lover of cinema and how it changed his outlook on life and lifestyle, ideology and content in different ways.  16 FRAMES also justifies the inclusion of 16 chapters in the book on subjects as varied and as all-encompassing as cinema itself that knows no boundaries.

The chapters are short because they have followed the general space newspapers and magazines permit to freelancers and all these have appeared in different newspapers and magazines. But let not the brevity of the chapters fool the reader in any way. They raise the curiosity of the reader and also fascinate him by the originality of the subject dealt with.

Some examples may prove the point. I’s Eyes: Exploring Use of Eyes in a few Films of the Kolkata International Film Festival 2016 throws up a completely new perspective on how ‘eyes’ have been used in different films by the respective filmmakers across time and space. He fortifies his reading with examples of films he has seen such as Kim Ki Duk’s Net and Kristina Grozeva-Petar Valchanov’s Glory and Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. from the international cinema map.

The short but crisp and detailed essays are marked by his uniquely distinct perspective and are often sectioned off with separate headings that shed light on the multi-layered aspects of each essay flush with examples of films that exemplify his argument. For example, the first essay, Of Father, Brothers and an Unholy Hunger – Looking at Kaaka Muttai and Sahaj Pather Gappo is sectioned off by several headings such as - The absent father, The free egg, Train – the aggressor and the provider and An unholy hunger that finally zeroes the focus on just two recent films - Kaaka Muttai and Sahaj Pather Gappo.

I loved the analysis of two recent versions of Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s classic Devdas – one by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and the other by Anurag Kashyap. The metamorphosis of the original Devdas from a tragic, triangular but purely platonic love story to one with strong sexual overtones offers a rare insight into the way he reads into mainstream films.

There are a few relatively abstract essays such as An Indian Film Theory and The Colour of Aesthetics that are backed by in-depth research and demand repeated reading. The second one gives one to think where he argues against the colourization of film classics like Ray’s Pather Panchali and manages to convert his readers to his point of view in case they thought otherwise.

Between spirit and bleakness – Village Rockstars and Manto offers a deep insight into two different women filmmakers – though the author does not treat them as “women” filmmakers – makes for a very interesting and insightful read indeed through its comparison and contrasting of the subject of the two films, the treatment they have been given and the contextual backdrop of the two directors one of who has handled every department of film making alone and yet won both notice and international awards.

And so the book reads on, like a river, sometimes placid, sometimes turbulent, flowing through the reader’s mind, through the films one has certainly watched and films one has never seen and is never likely to see, through the vicarious but rich experience of reading about them in a different vein and a different context. Did I say this is certainly not Amitava’s first book on cinema? I can flesh out that by adding – this is certainly not his last…….

Dr. Shoma A. Chatterji

Kolkata

Wednesday, 23 October 2019

 Contents

Introduction                                                                                                                          

From ‘Calcutta’ to ‘Kolkata’: The Journey of Bengali Cinema                                  1                 

The Marwaris in Satyajit Ray’s Films: ‘Outsiders’ in Bengali Psyche                                        

Ahead of Its Time: Rape of the Bengali Middle Class                                             

The Bengali Mother: Through Filmic Lenses                                                                                                   

An Ode to the Cigarette in Indian Cinema                                                              

Crossing Borders with Cinema                                                                                

From Devdas to Dev                                                                                                 

Iago versus Langda: Interpretation of the Shakespearean Villain                                                                    

Bistar Badal Jaate Hain … Par Aadmi Nahin Badalte:                                           The ‘Heroine’ from Bhumika to Iti Mrinalini                                                                                     The ‘Choice’ of the Filmic Woman                                                                                            

Chaturanga: The Complex Tapestry                                                                                 

The Colour of Aesthetics                                                                                      

I’s Eyes: Exploring Use of Eyes in a Few Films of the

Kolkata International Film Festival 2016                                                         

Of Father, Brothers and an Unholy Hunger:

Looking at Kaaka Muttai and Sahaj Pather Gappo                                                                          

Between Spirit and Bleakness: Village Rockstars and Manto                                            

An Indian Film Theory?                                                                                   

Introduction

Writing on cinema had never been my first choice as a profession. Being a graduate in Physics with a post-graduation in Computer Studies, I was safely and surely sailing to a cushioned software job at the turn of the millennium. I joined,India’s topmost IT giant, eventually, after university and, subsequently, moved to one of world’s best as well. However, in between writing codes, managing projects and architecting large data warehouses, I did write. Being born in Calcutta (it wasn’t Kolkata yet) in the early 1970s in an academic family had its pitfalls. We were a serious bunch of people, honestly. We didn’t have television at home till the late 1980s and cinema, due to lack of availability and my parents’ energies, were infrequent, almost meagre. We were encouraged to gorge on books and so did we. Much later, when I wrote vociferously about how cinema should untie its link with cinema, I found it intriguing as it was literature that paved my walkway to cinema.

   Now, I don't remember how and when I got interested to cinema seriously. Reading Bibhuti Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's epic Pather Panchali during a vacation at my grandmother’s place is the turning point for me. All that I can recollect now is that I was hitting adolescence at that time. The love for literature soared and watching Satyajit Ray’s first film at Nandan, the cinema centre in Calcutta , shortly after reading the novel sealed it for me. My parents must have noticed my liking for the moving images from my writing on cinema in our handwritten family magazine. I guess they did as , I was presented with Andrew Robinson’s superbly crafted The Inner Eye on Satyajit Ray on the occasion of my fifteenth birthday. My love for Ray and for cinema grew hand in hand since then.

   It was in the summer of 2001, after I came back to Kolkata, that a group of eventless youth including me clubbed together in the placid afternoons of leisurely Saturdays. Most of us met individually during the Kolkata Film Festival the preceding years and finally in 2001, the Silhouette Film Society was born. In those weekly meets,  we discussed cinema, argued with our individual points of view, fought vociferously and loved the conundrum. Members joined and lost, to corporate bandwagons and to film schools; yet, the Silhouette Film Society sailed through with private film shows and an enviable magazine—Silhouette. Over time, the print edition made way for a web magazine. As the scope of the magazine expanded, members became busy, film shows were fewer. It was for Silhouette that I first took to writing on cinema seriously, on ‘serious’ cinema if we understand what it means!

   Since then, for the last two decades, I have been writing on cinema regularly not only in Silhouette (now available at www.silhouette-magazine.com) but also in other outlets including The Hindu,Outlook,The Statesman, News18.com and The Wire to name a few. In between, I penned three books on cinema till date—Reading the Silhouettes, Beyond Apu: 20 Favourite film roles of Soumitra Chatterjee and Satyajit Ray’s Heroes and Heroines. I have a couple of other books that are lying with publishers at different stages of production. It is at this juncture that I realised that many of my early writings and also the not-so-early ones which are being lost. No one to blame but me since I never paid much heed in curating them systematically. The need for this book is to compile some of them into a collection.

   Over the years, I have written numerous articles on cinema—film reviews being the maximum, review of books on cinema and interviews taken of film personalities. Parallelly,I have also written several critical articles on cinema — the different trends, intertextualising  cinema with other art forms picking one or more films, so on and so forth. Of these, I have chosen sixteen articles for this collection, hence the name of the book.

   For amateur film-makers, 16 mm film (along with 8 mm) first came into being as a cheap alternative to the prevalent and professional 35 mm ones. I have no degree in film appreciation and yet I have written for two decades on cinema as an amateur and for love of the medium. My stance is probably similar to the amateur film-maker who took up the 16 mm film for his creative and analytical expression, almost a century back. From this aspect as well, I think the name of the book being 16 FRAMES is apt and commemorative.

   The articles in this book are a selected collection of critical essays on cinema. I have deliberately refrained from having or trying to establish a thematic link between them. The articles are written over a span of several years in disparate journals and magazines with varying philosophies. My intention is to embrace the diversity in them and to invite readers to appreciate the same in their own ways.

My indebtedness for the content of this book reaches out first to my ‘Silhouette’ mates. My understanding of cinema cultivated in the formative years of this millennium —thanks to them. I would also wish to single out my friend of undergraduate days Partha Sarathi Raha, who shared the same dream as mine, of becoming a film-maker, when we dared.  That I moved away from such an illusion to a different reality is a personal truth. However,through thick and thin, with several intense discussions and debates I had with him, for just being there as a mirror to reflect those thoughts, Partha ensured that I didn’t drift away far from cinema. Thanking friends with whom you grew up from being lanky boys to pot-bellied men is almost criminal—I won’t embarrass Partha, and in the process myself, by doing so.

   I would also thank Antara Nanda Mondal, Chief Editor, Learning and Creativity magazine. Antara emerged almost from nowhere quite a few summers back when I was contemplating of moving Silhouette magazine online. She is a rock-solid support of Silhouette now, a consulting editor and one of the most trusted friends.

When I was languishing my days in Pune in India’s leading IT company, playing football for ninety minutes in the afternoons and thinking of a better next day, Anil Saari Arora implanted the belief in me that I can write on cinema. A kindred soul, Anil da was a poet, a film critic, a journalist and what not. It was he who introduced me to the enigmatic Dilip Chitre and almost forced me to write for Maharashtra Herald,which he edited for a brief period, and also for New Quest magazine,which Dilip da edited. All these happened even before the Silhouette Film Society was even conceived. On the other side of life when I will meet both of them, I know they will embrace me with the same affection and tolerance.

   These days, writing on cinema in the form of books is primarily on film personalities. This book is a far cry from that task. It is also not an academic book with references outwitting the written text. My hope with this book is that the reader will find it a light reading and yet probing deeper questions than the superficial interpretations. The success of the book can be judged in creating that sense of unease, and to dive and drive further into the aesthetics of cinema from an amateur film critic.