The art of Cinema

By HAMEED ASHRAF | NT

Bengaluru: “Starting around the same time as the country’s de-colonization in the 1940s and 1950s, an aspiration and an enthusiasm to help build a new nation and fashion modern citizens fuelled Indian art cinema,” says Rochona Majumdar, an author and associate professor in the departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.

Speaking at an event entitled ‘Journeys of the Indian Art Film’ hosted by Bangalore International Centre on Thursday, Professor Rochona Mazumdar and author Amit Chaudhuri, both of whom are invested in the histories of cinema and the city, Kolkata in particular, discuss the role of art films in postcolonial India.

In 1951, the Patil committee made several recommendations, including a new Film Finance Corporation and an Institute of Film Technique. A year later, the country’s first international film festival screened films from Italy, Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In the years that followed, many institutions like the Children’s Film Institute (1955), Film Finance Corporation and Film Institute of India (1960) and National Film Archive of India (1964) were set up to align the making and watching of movies with nationbuilding.

“This talk explores this question with attention to the Indian new wave of the late 1960s-1970s. There is much controversy around the point that the body of films referred to as the Indian new wave were different from mainstream films as well as art films that preceded them. Yet, contemporary critics and film scholars acknowledge that there was ferment in Indian cinema during this period not witnessed before or since,” Mazumdar, who is currently engaged in writing a history of Indian art cinema, said.

Amit Chaudhuri explains, “To me, it is increasingly clear especially in the light of the changes in politics and culture in the last quarter of a century that Satyajit Ray is the only embodiment of an Indian “high” modernity, specifically a vernacular “high” modernity that the world has had to deal with.

The ‘world’, in this instance, refers to places in Europe and America where film festivals were hosted, the great metropolitan cities in which debates to do with “culture” were decided, drawing in the Indian intelligentsia.

Analyzing the films of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak, and working through previously unexplored archives of film society publications, Majumdar offers a radical reinterpretation of Indian film history. She contends their works captured the unresolvable contradictions of the postcolonial present, which pointed toward possible, yet unrealized futures.

Art Cinema and India’s Forgotten Futures offers sweeping new insights into film’s relationship with the postcolonial condition and its role in decolonial imaginations of the future.

“What drew me towards Bollywood, were the black-and-white movies of the 50s and 60s; movies I hadn’t seen either because they’d been made before I was born or when I was too small, or because my middle-class upbringing prohibited me from taking them seriously. The movies – especially the great artists in that lineage, such as Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, Kamal Amrohi, and early Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor – told me what no other document could about the India I’d left behind, both physically and in time,” Amit said.

“The Muslim storytellers and poets who wrote the scripts and composed lyrics for the songs to make a living; the music arrangers of Christian, “Anglo-Indian” origin. The disappearance of the old craft and lyricism, the substitution of musical innovation with assembly-line noise, the rise of the VCR, the waning of Nehruvian pieties, and the gradual rise of the Hindu right had combined to create conditions in which Bollywood lost both its magic and its confidence, and fewer and fewer people were watching what were increasingly commercially driven but irrelevant movies”, Amit said.

The book, “Art Cinema And India’s Forgotten Futures: Film And History in the PostColony”, written by Majumdar, also demonstrates how films emerged as a mode of doing history and that, in so doing, it anticipated some of the most influential insights of postcolonial thought.