A Buddhadeb Dasgupta retrospective in Sri Lanka

The Asian Film Centre, Srilanka, has organised a festival of six films directed by filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta. Ashley Ratnavibhushana, founder of the Asian Film Centre, informed that in October, Srilankan cineastes will get to see the works of some of the best filmmakers in India. The films, some of them made available by the Directorate of Film Festivals are Grihajuddha, Phera, Tahader Katha, Charachar, Lal Darja and Uttara, his latest film that fetched him the Swarna Kamal for Best Director at the National Awards this year.

“I began in a small way with documentaries. I made a ten-minute documentary in 1968 titled The Continent of Love. I did several more in the following years, including King of Drums (1974) which won the Best Documentary Award” he says, going on to state that he never honed the skills and the art of filmmaking at any film school. “I learnt about my craft from watching films, reading about them and listening to people talk about them” says Dasgupta, taking a nostalgic trip into his past.

In 1978, he made his first full-length feature film, Dooratwa (Distance.) Based on a short story by noted Bengali litterateur Sirsendu Mukhopadhyay, the film was completed in just 16 shooting days on an incredibly low budget, exposing just 20,000 feet of film in totality.

Grihajuddha (Crossroads) made in 1982, was based on a Dibyendu Palit story. This was Dasgupta, crossing Black-and-White to step into colour. He uses the format of a slickly made political-thriller to unfold the story of a family’s victimisation to corporate politics which goes on to portray how one member, the daughter engaged to be married to her dead brother’s runaway friend, draws strength and moral courage from the very oppression they are victim to.

The story is built around a few individuals whose lives are trapped in an urban corner where all the exit points have suddenly been closed. Which is tragic considering each one of them is fighting a war (griha - meaning home and juddha - meaning war) and is seeking his/ her own way out of this war. If one is fighting a war for love, another is fighting a war for integrity, and a third is forced to wage a war for the very basic reason of survival. Somewhere along the way, these separate, individualistic men, congregate and the difference between them is nothing more than a confused blur. Grihajuddha won the Fipresci Jury award at the Venice International Film Festival in 1982.

Phera, (The Return) filmed in 1986, was based on a story by Prafulla Roy. Phera unspools the story of Sasanka, the last descendant of a feudal aristocratic family. His passion is to write plays for the jatra, a folk touring theatre of Bengal that portrays larger-than-life characters often borrowing from Hindu mythology and folklore with a moral at the end.

With the influence of the gaining popularity of cinema as a mass entertainment medium, Sasanka discovers to his shock, that the traditional character of the jatra gets compromised to suit the tastes of a cinema-hungry audience. He retreats into his shell, like he did when his wife ran away with his friend many years ago.

An introvert by nature, Sasanka’s only contact with the outer world is through a strange form of relaxation - watching his two hired wrestlers wrestle in his compound. In this deserted milieu, enters his wife’s widowed sister Saraju, with her small son Kanu. Through disillusionment and frustration, Phera marks Sasanka’s return to his roots - his roots of his obsession - the jatra, and to the roots of his emotionally starved life - through Kanu. Phera won the National Award for Best Screenplay, Best Regional Film (Bengali) and Best Child Artist at the National Awards.

“The idea of making Phera and Bagh Bahadur came to me first when I was making a documentary on a great drummer called Dholer Raja in 1973. I discovered that his rare art was in danger of extinction because neither his son nor his grandson wanted to learn to play the drum, because there is no money or respect in it. So also, other priceless performing arts are dying out for want of patrons” says Dasgupta about the trigger that set him off to make these films.

Tahader Katha (Their Story) made in 1992 from a Kamal Kumar Majumdar story, described the agony of a freedom fighter, Shibnath (Mithun Chakravarty), who, after spending precious years of his life in the British prisons of the Andamans, confronts an independent India with its moral fibre twisted badly out of shape. “Tahader Katha portrays the crisis of the human being trapped between the world of his dreams and the world of reality,” says Dasgupta.

“Still, I think the world is meaningful because such dreamers exist. It would have been dreadful otherwise.” According to critic Chidananda Dasgupta, Tahader Katha “is a striking, unusual, disturbing film, both in story content and in the way its form develops.” The film bagged the Best Actor, the Best Screenplay and the Best Regional Film (Bengali) awards. “One of the film’s strength lies in the timelessness and the universality of its theme, conveyed with simple conviction,” said Derek Hill of The Times, London.

Charachar (Shelter of the Wings) made in 1993, is the story of Lakhinder, a bird-catcher, who sells his catch. In the process of his trade, Lakhinder discovers the cruelty of imprisoning a species of winged creatures whose very survival is determined by their freedom. His obsessive love for the very birds he is supposed to sell becomes his undoing. His wife leaves him for want of basic needs of food and clothing. The film is an exploration of the universal phenomenon of estrangement and alienation resulting from an obsession all of which go to create an impressionistic melange of memories, insights and concepts.

Lakhinder’s one-ness with the winged creatures also stands for his own craving for freedom - freedom defined on his own terms, where the basic needs of food, clothing and shelter are neatly replaced by his love for his winged friends who wake him up at daybreak, filling every niche in his hut, perching themselves on his waking body, as he wakes up to the reality of freedom for himself and freedom for his winged friends. In the opinion of this writer, Charachar is Dasgupta’s most lyrical and perfect film to date, seamless in its editing. The film evolves a rhythm of its own as it moves on. Soumyendu Roy’s brilliant cinematography of the sea and the sky that often appear in Lakhinder’s dreams, match the wavy movements of Lakhinder’s birds.

“The making of Charachar, based on a Prafulla Roy story, was not a sudden decision on my part. Usually there is enough exercise of thinking on a subject before it is filmed. Seeds are sown much before the plant is born. I take long years to think over a particular theme how to transplant it in my own way into the visual medium. Except my first film, I have taken to profound thinking to make my films. The realisation of all my films is thus born of certain rational and emotional thinking,” says Dasgupta. It won the Golden Lotus for the Best Feature Film and the Best Screenplay awards.

It is difficult to make a film on a man’s inner journey which would be more cerebral than emotional, and which could challenge a filmmaker’s command over the craft and the tools of the medium. But Dasgupta has taken it up and seen it through its end. Lal Darja reflects the vision of nothingness that haunts this century. This vision expresses itself through a man like Nabin Dutta who had lost touch with his childhood magic in his search for materialistic ascendancy. When he realises this sense of loss, does he get it back?

Dasgupta’s script moves back and forth within Nabin’s mind, blending reality with fantasy, the present with the past, the individual with the collective. “Most of the story took shape from bits and pieces of my own childhood, which took me from place to place because my medical practitioner father had a transferable job. I realised that when we grow up, we do not really grow up from being a child to becoming an adult, but we become two separate entities altogether. Adulthood is not just a natural and logical extension of our own childhood. As we metamorphose into adults, we take within us the chemistry of the world and the experience around us. We also shed a few precious things of which, innocence is the most crucial. To some people like Nabin in my film, this can make the difference between living and loving, or losing the power to do both” says Dasgupta.

Dasgupta’s ‘distancing’ between individuals, men and women, resulting from the zeitgeist they live in - the spirit of the times - has widened into an unbridgeable, unfathomable chasm of disillusionment and betrayal finally crying out in desperation to be saved, and heard - in his latest film Uttara. The ‘child’, for example, as a metaphor of hope, a symbol of the sun-filled future, that made its presence felt so strongly in his earlier films Phera, Lal Darja in a manner of speaking and even in Tahader Katha, is still there in the shape of the orphaned Mathew in Uttara. But he is no longer a ray of hope in a gloomy future. Rather, he hides behind a mask, within the protective circle of the masked dancers who can hardly protect themselves. The basically innocent and good human being of Tahader Katha, Bagh Bahadur and Charachar has shifted from centrestage to the margin in the shape of the Padri Baba, the midget railway guard and Uttara herself in Uttara.

On the surface, Uttara could be interpreted as a triangular love story where two, simple, unlettered men are torn between their close friendship on the one hand and their love for the same girl, Uttara, on the other. But to label it a triangular love story, would be an oversimplification. And perhaps, a misinterpretation. Uttara speaks of lovelessness rather than of love. Wrestling, a macho, fun sport for men, can easily turn into a killing sport for the same men, says Dasgupta. A dwarf may be slighted and ignored by the majority of non-dwarfs.

But his heart could be taller than the tall men who tower over him. The fundamentalists may have killed the pastor. But the masked dancers have rescued his heir, Mathew, to take up from where Padri Baba left off. The film is cinematically brilliant, with excellent cinematography, a dream-like setting that lends itself ideally to the volatile changes in the ambience and mood of the film. It exudes a strange feeling of actual heat, giving credibility to the rising heat within the two main characters.

One of a handful of filmmakers who still represent the now-decadent off-mainstream Indian cinema, Buddhadeb Dasgupta has consistently tried to define and re-define the significance of the auteur in cinema. One easily notices the consistent undercurrent of the increased alienation of the individual in his films.

Shoma A Chatterji