Saturday, August 16, 2008

Five documentaries of Assam in German festival

PRESS RELEASE

One Sileti colloquial film finds international audience

The present state of affairs of Assam film industry might be suffering from acute drought of feature film but the documentary sphere is not. As many as five documentaries of the state are making road to the 5th edition of “Bollywood and Beyond”. It’s a festival of Indian Film Festival held annually in Stuttgart city of Germany and this time being held from 16 to 20 July.

The films are ‘Children of the River: The Xihus of Assam’ (direction: Mauleenath Senapati), ‘Distant Rumblings’ (Bani Prakash Das), ‘The Brew of Eastern Clouds’ (Tinat Atifa Masood), ‘Sand Castle’ (Pramod Das), and ‘Kunir Kutil Dosha – The elbow in exile’ (Altaf Mazid). Wiebke A.C. Reiss, the Programme Director of the festival attended the MIFF 2008 (Mumbai International Film festival of Short, Documentary and Animation films) and picked up two films from the competition section – ‘The Xihus of Assam’ and ‘Distant Rumblings’. ‘The Brew of Eastern Clouds’ and ‘Sand Castle’ were screened in the Northeast package of film of the festival curated by film critic Chandan Sarma. The contents of the films in the festival catalogue caught her attention but Wiebke could preview them after contacting the concerned directors. The production format of four out of the five selected is video except ‘Sand castle’ by Promod Das, which is in 16 mm shot by Marinal Kanti Das.

It is to be noted that it was the ‘Bollywood and Beyond’ and Wiebke A.C. Reiss who discovered the artistic uniqueness in Jyotiprasad Agarwalla’s ‘Joymoti’ and invited the film for international premier in their 2006 edition.

Website of the festival: http://www.filmbuerobw.de

Film details:

1. Children of the River: The Xihus of Assam, 29 min., Dir: Mauleenath Senapati

Synopsis: The 3000 kilometre-long river Brahmaputra is the homeland of the‚ Xihus’, a endangered species of dolphins. Due to increasing pollution that is destroying the natural wildlife, the dolphins, have to fight for their survival.

2. The Brew of Eastern Clouds, 28 min., Betacam-SP, Dir: Tinat Atifa Masood, English

Synopsis: In 1838 the Englishman Charles Alexander Bruce brought black tea from Assam to London for the first time – until then tea was a luxury good for the upper-class. Bruce observed how the people from Singpho in Assam made their tea from wild plants and developed a commercial method for the production. The tea gave Assam its identity and this identity was expanded recently as the tea tourism developed.

3. Distant Rumblings, 22 min., Betacam-SP, Dir: Bani Prakash Das, English

Synopsis: In 1942 the Japanese armed forces began their offence against India and the Northeast of the country became the Indo-Burma Front. Over 60 years after the war's end the director Bani Prakash Das visited the northwestern regions of Nagaland and Manipur, in which one can still find the physical and psychological wounds of the war.

4. Sand Castle, Dir: Promod Das, 21 min, 16 mm, English

Synopsis: In the Indian region Assam, the Mians live on sandbanks. The tribe emigrated from Bangladesh to India in the 19th century. They live away from civilization, without electricity, cars or schools and the most of them live of farming and fishing. The Brahmaputra and his banks are their home, even though the Monsoon leaves a track of destruction in their villages, the Mians indefatigable look for new places to live.


5. Kunir Kutil Dosha (The elbow in exile), 12 min., Betacam SP, Dir: Altaf Mazid, Sileti with English subtitles

Synopsis: Descriptions of the human body have always had a high value in poetry and prose, even today in times of the internet. From the tip of the hair to the toes every part of the body, especially the female one, got treated in poems. Just one part of the human being is ignored till now: the elbow.

Kunir Kutil Dosha is based on an article by noted novelist Roma Bezbarua. Bibhu Ranjan Choudhury has done the Sileti translation of the film text. He has also lent his voice for background narration. The English translation of the sub-titles is by Saurav Kumar Chaliha. Local screening of the film was held in Adda’s 2007 film festival of 31st October and now Bollywood and Beyond is going to open it for the international audience.

Enquiry: Chandan Sarma (94351-47333) / Promod Das (94350-24956) / Moulee Senapati (94350-17554) / Tinat Atifa Masood (98640-64068) / Bani Prakash Das (99541-50850)


Joymoti : The first radical talkie of India



In the history of Indian cinema are a few filmmakers who, by virtue of their creative ability, intense labour and extraordinary perseverance, have come to be considered genius. D G Phalke, V Shantaram, Pramathes Barua, Himansu Roy, Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray are some such figures. Traveling through the little roads of Assam, we find another member of that pantheon: Jyotiprasad Agarwalla (1903-51), one of the greatest cultural figures to have been produced by the state. He made only two films, far less than other filmmakers, yet with his first film alone he could be distinguished as a radical auteur of all India. Nevertheless, he is little known.

Joymoti, released in 1935, added a new chapter in the chronicles of Indian cinema, primarily in the discourse of realism. Further, Jyotiprasad was the only political filmmaker of pre-independent India, though there were many in post-independent India, starting with Ritwik Ghatak. Above all else, Joymoti is a nationalist film in its attempts to create a cultural world using the elements of Assamese society. It is the only work of its kind of that period.

Biographers of Jyotiprasad Agarwalla are often mystified with the diversity of his interests. From a playwright in his mid-teens, to a popular dramatist, to a newspaper editor; first a student of law, then of music; composing tunes originally by blending local and Western music, later writing revolutionary poems and songs; writing children’s literature, then art criticism, then intellectual essays. Jyotiprasad established a makeshift studio to make the first Assamese feature film, and later transformed the space into a cultural centre dedicated to the causes of the people. He organised a volunteer force for M K Gandhi’s Salt March; he was labelled by the imperial government as an absconder, surrendered, and was imprisoned twice. He joined in the Communist-led uprising of 1942; he resigned from a government body in order to protest the compulsory contribution by the government to the World War II effort; he was president of the first India People’s Theatre Association conference in Assam. The list is endless. One constant remains throughout, however: politics was inseparable from Jyotiprasad’s works, whether in poetry or drama, dance or theatre, music or moving image. Throughout his varied career, we see the same conscientious artist striving to express himself in aesthetic terms – with a worldview of his own, immersed in deep love for Assamese literature and culture.

The making of the film Joymoti is remarkable on many counts, yet two things are particularly striking. First was the form of the constructed imagery that discarded norms of Indian cinema (read: ‘faded photocopy of spicy Hollywood’) that had been prevalent since its birth in 1912. Second was the director’s inflexible determination in achieving the concept of that form in the truest possible way. These two intertwined, complimentary aspects cannot be discussed separately. For revealing the natural life of a particular region of Assam, Jyotiprasad decided he would have to develop his own style rather than import elements from elsewhere. Established actors are far removed from the types of characters essential for a lifelike portrayal; studios based in other parts of the country are either too busy producing films for mass consumption, or too incapable of feeling the pulse of the alien concepts espoused by Jyotiprasad.

Jyotiprasad wished to follow the doctrine of cinematic realism as expressed by the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov (although back then, the term in vogue was ‘innovative cinema’). Kuleshov demanded that all things theatrical be banished from films, so as to make way for the aesthetic value of documentary truth, montage and real-life material. His ideas of a new film culture were founded as per changes that had occurred in the Soviet Union after the revolution in 1917. Jyotiprasad came across these ideas while studying in London. He was a visitor to the German government-founded UFA studio in Berlin for six months. There, he took up the idea of ‘innovative cinema’, as something capable of embracing the spirit of anti-colonial uprising in India. For his active role in the non-cooperation movement against the British, he had been officially declared an absconder prior to his journey to the West. For him, there was no question: only now could a new culture begin.

The content of Joymoti is also innovative: a widely popular legend of a 17th century princess of the Ahom dynasty who died of the torture meted out by a puppet king. Joymoti had remained silent about her husband, who had fled the state and whom the king had wanted to kill as a competitor of the throne. The oppression and passive resistance of the film’s story paralleled the situations prevalent in India during 1930s British rule. Thus, the realistic depiction in the film was a political approach, contradicting the theatrical style of acting, costume and sets, which at the time were the dominant features of Indian films. Cinematic content of productions in other Indian regions were also overtly religious, based on mythology. Contrary to such films, Joymoti was based on real historical materials – although history books are silent about a particular lady named Joymoti.

Studio in Assam
While Jyotiprasad pursued Kuleshov’s ideas on filmmaking, he increasingly wanted the culture of film to take hold in Assam. He was perfectly capable of organising financing that could have allowed him to shoot his film in any major studio in Calcutta or Pune, but his ideology barred him from doing so. The idea subsequently arose of establishing his
own studio in Assam. Jyotiprasad was deeply sceptical about any misrepresentation of the traditional culture of his land. He also felt that, as cinema had already attained worldwide popularity, without a filmmaking centre the people of Assam would lag behind culturally.

The studio in Bholaguri was a large concrete platform, with open-air enclosures of bamboo mats and banana plants. It used the sun as its only source of light. Jyotiprasad floated newspaper advertisements for actors and actresses, mentioning brief outlines of the film and descriptions of the characters. His idea was to get ‘types’ for his characters, not seasoned artists, even offering remunerations for successful candidates. One of his preconditions was that potential actors needed to be from ‘respectable’ family backgrounds, as opposed to those from red-light areas that had been used during the 1930s in Calcutta. After a prolonged search and detailed interviews, he brought together the chosen ones to acquaint them with his characters as well as with the techniques of filmmaking, with an eye towards establishing a film industry in Assam. Few of them had ever even seen a film. He sought out a trio, Bhupal Shankar Mehta and the Faizi Brothers, from Lahore as cameraman and sound-recordists. He brought to Guwahati those individuals who were still fresh and yet to be weighed down by the commercially-dominant Hindustani cinema (the term Jyotiprasad used in his writings), whose hub at that time was in Lahore, across the expanse of the Brahmaputra, Ganga and Indus plains, in Punjab.

Jyotiprasad designed the set using bamboo hats and mats, deer and buffalo horns, Naga spears, and other traditional materials. A museum-like property room was also created, where the director culled traditional costumes, ornaments and handicrafts for the set’s decor. For developing film, ice was brought from Calcutta by steamer, train and automobile.
Joymoti might have allowed Jyotiprasad to project the political values of the ‘Assamese’ screen-images. But compared to the works of other filmmaking regions of undivided India, it was a disaster in terms of technical quality – particularly sound. The cheap battery-operated sound-recording system chartered from Lahore turned out to be quite inadequate, which he found out only at the editing table in Lahore during ‘post-production’. With limited money, he could not return to Assam for re-recording. In that part of then-India, there was no possibility of getting another Assamese-speaking person. Finding no other option, Jyotiprasad accepted the default output and dubbed about thirty characters with his own voice, including those of the female characters.

Back home, there existed just two cinema houses in the then-undivided Assam, in Guwahati and Shillong. These were highly inadequate to ensure a return on his investments. He proceeded to build a movie theatre for himself in Tezpur, and arranged a number of itinerant shows around the state. People turned out in large numbers to witness the marvel of Assamese moving images, besides paying homage to the legendary protagonist namesake. Nonetheless, the audience failed to appreciate its merits, partially due to naiveté in recognising the film’s realistic approach.

Although he had been an heir to his family fortune, Joymoti left Jyotiprasad bankrupt. Despite his pre-eminence, he was never a representative of the film trade, nor was he able to change the course of mainstream filmmaking. Four years later, in 1939, he made his second and last film, Indramalati. It was shot in a Calcutta studio with an eye towards the
box-office. Although he was able to recoup his original productions costs, proceeds from Joymoti never materialised, and Jyotiprasad shuttered his studio thereafter.

Regional realism
Discussions about realism in Indian cinema (here confined to ‘nationalist’ and socially conscious films that have been regarded as landmark Indian works) usually start with four films made within a four-year period prior to 1947. They are Bimal Roy’s Udayer Pathe (1944) and its remake, Humrahi (1945), Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar (1945), and K A Abbas’ Dharti Ke Lal (1946). After Independence, this list would include Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Pachali (1955), this last of which opened a new discourse on ‘regional reality’.

With the exception of Pather Pachali, this list includes several dominant themes and oppositions: the struggles between the haves and have-nots, the country and the city, and the tenant or peasant and the landlord or moneylender. In format, the films are characteristic in turning to Hollywood as a model – although this dynamic still takes place within the Bombay mode of production. There are no radical stylistic departures in demand for realism. The actors in these films were mostly established stars, although studios tried to refashion them as ‘common’ men and women.

Joymoti has yet to figure in discussions related to realism and Indian cinema. This oversight may be partly due to the film having been made in a marginal-language area, and partly due to non-circulation of the film since its release in 1935. When compared with those films listed above, Joymoti appears as perhaps the most pioneering work in depicting realism in Indian cinema – both in concept, and in the persistence in realising that concept. Even the phrase ‘regional reality’, which has been used for Pather Pachali, perhaps could be redefined by going back to this work of Jyotiprasad’s.

Joymoti may also be seen as India’s first feminist film. Three of the film’s female characters – Joymoti herself, her close friend Seuti, and the king’s mother – were against the royal court’s politics. Although they were not vocal in their disagreement, their tactical and silent protests are quite noteworthy. Furthermore, viewers see a host of women joining them, all of which are unusually realistic female depictions. Indian cinematic women were otherwise painted as mother, goddess, vamp, prostitute, hunterwali, et al – full of grace, beauty and seduction (See Himal Nov-Dec 2005, “’She’ and the Silver Screen”). Jyotiprasad’s care in his depictions of his female protagonists can be traced from his very first play, written at the age of 14. Throughout his subsequent decades of playwriting, there is one binding commonality through his plays: the critical hand that the female characters have in determining the stories’ major events. After Joymoti, however, the Indian woman would have to wait until the 1950s to appear in her full, real form on movie screens of the Subcontinent.

It is not appropriate to say that Jyotiprasad Agarwalla of Assam needs to be re-discovered by the world of Southasian cinema, because he was never discovered in the first place. It is time, in the rush of today’s Hindi/Hindustani film world to embrace the world market, to look back at an unsung director who was a true pioneer of realism. It is even possible that digging so far into the past will inform current media practitioners in a way that their own future works may steer closer to reality, and away from the frivolity to which many seem to have succumbed.

Published in Himal Magazine in March 2006 - http://www.himalmag.com

The cinematic wings of Ganga Silonir Pakhi


Two moments from the life of Basanti


The best way to appreciate Ganga Silonir Pakhi (Wings of the Tern, B & W, 1975, hereafter GSP) is to stop worshipping it in the temples of ‘realist cinema’, ‘parallel cinema’, ‘art cinema’, ‘Indian new wave’, ‘regional cinema’ and the like. Too many writers and critics, including this self-styled pundit, are of opine that discussion about the film be made in the light of the national and international cinemas of similar content and nature. These sorts of loose dialogue have cheapened GSP. GSP is a tour de force not because it is realistic, or parallel, or art, or new wave or regional, but because the way the film controls a dark and serious theme, so complete to stand on its own feet, the way a magician does his tricks. GSP is the first modern piece of moving image of Assam.

We are not going to tag it as a film of any above kind but see it as ‘film as film’ by placing it within the four corners of the screen alone. We are neither interested to know why it took Padum Barua ten years to complete the film or why this work has remained his only work of feature. We know he was a government servant with commendable sense of film history and western music but how much he applied his administrative and creative aptitudes in his film is not matter of judgement. We are privileged that GSP is the only work of Barua, otherwise, the necessity of speaking about his body of works remains an obligation. Furthermore, we are not going to compare the film with the famous novel of the same title on which it has its base. These kinds of evaluation of ‘literature vs. cinema’ and/or vice-versa have already created confusions with many a film why the film is not an exact translation of the written words, in spite of the fact that film and literature are two different media existing in two different poles having no connection between them. Cinema is moving image and literature, written word. Padum Barua has rightly acknowledged the author in the title sequence of the film. The information is sufficient for our record having little further use. The audience is comfortable enough with the visuals of the film alone. Some might feel to refer the original text, before or after witnessing the film, but that will be purely an academic as well as a classroom exercise. Furthermore, we will pull ourselves out from reviewing the performance of the actors, even that of the two legendary actresses of the bygone era who appeared in the film. A film like GSP was not designed to glorify the acting skills of the so-called ‘starts’ of the tinsel screen. For Padum Barua, they were to drive his thoughts home, akin to all the other living and non-living properties that he had chosen to put in his viewfinder. Finally, why GSP failed to win a prize anywhere, and why a mediocre Assamese film made in the same year snatched away the national award from the hands of the former has no curiosity in this write-up. That who was the cameraman, and who assisted Barua in different stages of the filmmaking process like script, costume, light, make-up, food, transportation, etc, finds no mention here. Barua was supposed to deliver the 'Bible of Assamese cinema’ to the earth. He did it but who were the other occupants in the table of last supper is the stuff of other narrative.

The film depicts the story of Basanti, a young village woman, pitted against two men in a small town environment of the sixties. After the death of her husband Mathura, she starts dreaming of a new life with her former lover Dhananjay. He fails to respond forcing Basanti into the lonely life within a widow’s bondage. With this minimum material Barua has created a vision that has remained as impressive today as thirty years ago. In one hand, it is a realization of social comment and a milestone of cinematic fineness on the other. The narrative is filled up with love, power, class, money, friendship, hate, honesty, custom, etc but it never indulged in dealing them with any pretence. Barua had the will to control the elements for larger artistic ends with honesty that is rare in show business like cinema. For arriving at this desired level, Barua easily organised two essential strings of filmmaking. Cinema moves back and forth between two extremities - as a recorder of an image and a preconceived interpreter of the same image. Barua embraced the same age-old notion in any given moment of the film. One tends to compare the approach with the Russian school of film aesthetics. Sergie Eisenstein created poetic imagination in his films by using raw documentary data. GCP in its own way extends this film tradition and to him control of craft was a child’s play.

From the take-off shot, we enter in to Basanti’s world of sand and water. A pan movement of a deserted bank of river with a branch of dry twig lying on it makes the beginning of this film of uncertainty. Basanti is changing her clothes after a bath. Next, she fills a brass pot with water, and lifts it to her lap and makes a move. Hearing a bird sound, she stares at sky to a flying tern. The shot gets freeze and the name casting of the film begins appearing. Thus within a few minutes the director introduces several major motifs of the film – water, river, dryness, naked branch of tree, white clothes, flying tern etc. In addition, he ruthlessly forecasts her prospects in the immediate next shot. The trail in the mooring place through which Basanti returns home is diagonal from middle right to extreme lower corner of the frame. The flying tern signifies her airborne mind and the road on the real earth is full of oblique predicaments. She passes besides a moderate forest of dry bamboo that again suggests the mess that she in encountering. The moment she encounters the flying term her life takes a new turn of tension and surprise. As if the tern has cast its spell on a particular woman.

Taru, the elder sister-in-law, is sweeping the courtyard, while Basanti enters the house of bamboo fences. The naked ends of the interwoven bamboo sticks covering lower half of the camera frame pointing towards the sky as Basanti passes through the courtyard is also a pointer to her. If we remove the next few shots of Taru abusing her children for mocking an old man, half-blind old mother working with the beetle nut hammer stand, Taru sewing on a piece of clothe etc, we land in Basanti’s chamber doing her hair in front of an oval-shaped mirror. Dhanajay, her would-be lover and the final betrayer, enters the courtyard with a cycle, and enquires, ‘is anyone there’? The girl comes out and meets the boy. The Cupid was lurking somewhere and throws his arrow. The geometry of any oval object speaks that it is neither round nor square. No matter how satisfyingly Basanti makes her presentable, the situation is still unbalanced. Dhananjay arriving in a bicycle imparts an additional hint that he might not be the last bed of roses for Basanti, with his moving tyres he would flee at any unpleasant situation. A small addition in between - Taru is disturbed to the cruel sound of a crow in the nearby banana tree. Barua suggests an age-old omen here that the particular sound of that particular bird brings bad luck. The wooden frame of the mirror is also an object of interest. The longer two sides have the character of two extended wings of bird flying up to the sky.

Throughout the film, Barua have placed Basanti in relation with similar objects of insecurity. When the lovers exchanged their words of love, Basanti makes a bashful grin by playing her necklace with her right hand fingers. The left of the frame reveals a bamboo window made of crossed sticks further putting a negative cross mark about the outcome of their just started affair. In the subsequent shots, we see them never in comfortable locations but always obstructed by bush or shrub and/or surrounded by still water. Water, in fact, is a major character in the film be it still or flowing. Tern is a water bird; the middle of a dry river is the location of the cowherd singer while he is strolling on the back of a buffalo, Basanti meets Dhananjay at the time of their failed affair due to awkward political development on two opposite sides of a lonely river bank; Dhananjay further asks her to elope with him in a boat that is placed in the river bank; Manbori the house cleaner that carried the reunion letter to Dhanajay at the end of the film passes a long journey - first on foot along a river and then in a boat similar to one that was chartered by Dhananjay at the time of the plan of escape etc. While Dhananjay was informing Basanti about his past life that he is a drifter having no permanent co-ordinates, a shot shows a portion of river soaked in the light of falling afternoon sun over the left shoulder of Basanti. The left shoulder is a part of human body where another human gets a support. Now at that juncture of Dhananjay’s life Basanti’s shoulder puts a doubt of his intensions. Again, Basanti reads Dhanajay’s letter in the mooring place surrounded by dry sand and low water. Barua has never used the flowing river in its full potential. He kept it in a distance with minimum basic flow of the winter season.

Use of exchange of written words in form of letter in GSP is also motivating. Dhananjay wrote his first and the last letter to Basanti to meet him at ‘the crack of dawn’ to begin a new life together. Basanti writes back after her husband’s death now requesting him to lift her from the prison of widowhood. The film gets its twist with the phenomenon of these two simple pieces of paper. The wedding song of her marriage also centres on a theme of exchange of letter – rãmkrishnã send a letter by hand / rãmkrishnã to father’s house. Barua has used a similar traditional element to delve Basanti’s mind. She reads aloud the words of a religious book, again in form of written word, to her mother about the resplendent Baikuntha (heaven) - there is lake of clear water full of blooming fragrant lotus where birds resonate amidst the sun, the moon, and various precious stones. Although she is reading for the ailing mother but the situation if co-related with the growth of the story until now speaks a reverse view-point. She is actually reading the words for herself. In the immediate previous sequence, her elder brother has rejected the suggestion of Basanti’s marriage because of financial crisis. He had cut the pitch of his wife short on the note of budgetary evaluation and the wife is left dumb-founded from even mentioning the name of Dhananjay as a possible suitor, which she ensured to Basanti in the afternoon.

Use of boat and cycle in the film leads us to a path of widening insights - boat as medium of love-sick mind and cycle as the vehicle of promise as well as devastation. Dhananjay makes the first appearance in Basanti’s house driving in a bicycle. Bhogram the elder brother invites Dhananjay to their home and they travel in bicycle. Mathura after knowing the pre-marital affair of his wife suffers mental setback and dies in collision of a lorry while travelling in his cycle. The last shot of the sequence of Bhogram and Dhananjay passing through a lonely road is highly stylised. It’s a top angle left to right pan shot taken from a raised position revealing the duo driving ahead. In the foreground, we see long extended dry branches of a same tree. What in the stake here is the cinematic translation of the proverb, ‘welcoming the crocodile by digging water channel to home’! Dhananjay visits Basanti after her husband’s death in a cycle but this time not to heal her mind but body with some medicine. The potentiality of an incoming cycle creeps around her mind until the last few moment of the film. Monbari has not returned yet from Dhananjay. She has gone for the second time to his house for a ‘yes’. Basanti is waiting impatiently in her room. Hearing a cycle bell, she looks trough the window but it is someone else passing through the front road. Basanti keeps waiting and we never hear another promise-bell.

In the foreground of the shot while Basanti stares at the unknown cyclist, we see three thick iron rods blocking her face. She is inside a prison. We see similar compositions while her first confrontation with Mathura on the onset of the discussions about her pre-martial relationship. Barua has put several iron bars over her face as she goes on talking on her defence. Further, the Alna, the rack of cloth, another property in the room, erects a barrier between the two, in a diagonal position extended to Mathura’s end. Mathura is absent in the frame but his voice is. The notion that ‘camera as a recorder of an image and a preconceived interpreter of the same image’ is best understood in these compositions. Barua has performed an analogous act in another sequence with the use of an ordinary piece of rope. Mathura overhears a conversation of a group of people in a roadside tea stall that is saturated with Basanti and Dhananja’s affair. He was about to light a cigarette with the flare end of a jute rope. As he completes the act, the words of ridicule from the by chitchats enter his ears. He develops cold feet at the sudden uncovering of the secret. Barua made sense of Mathura’s inner shock by placing the rope in a circular fashion hanging at the end of a perpendicular bamboo post. Mathura’s face remains half-covered with the rope as if he is standing in a hangman’s gallows. The cigarette smoke, although the cigarette is absent in the frame, his right hand appears to be holding it, flies upward. The rising smoke carries connotation of his burning state of mind.

The final sequence of GSP is an exceptionally well-crafted piece of cinema. When Basanti’s recall of Dhananjay turned catastrophic, she once again asks Monbari, Are you speaking the truth? Monbori replies, Yes, Your Mistress, I heard it myself. Close up of Basanti - a dispassionate face immersed in all the cool and calm of late afternoon. I will take my leave then! Monobori asks with an equally deep-seated gesture. Basanti nods a little. Top shot from a raised position. Monbori goes out of the camera; Basanti is standing between two bamboo poles of the compound gate. After a few moments, she turns slowly and walks back to the house situated at the end of the compound road. Barua created an illusion of Basabti’s entrapment between the bamboo pieces that are lying parallel to the base of the frame by covering the second piece with the lower portion of her dark shawl. The impression breaks as she withdraws from the position and turns back.

Several elements of the frame catches attention of the discern viewer. On the left, a barren tree is standing with extended naked branches. The shape of the largest branch is a rectangular ‘u’ that imparting the feel of an enclosure blocking her backward movement. The broken leaves of the banana tree standing on the right also speak about her wrecked mind. The compound road is running perpendicular to the camera ends at the veranda of the house. Now on she will be the lone traveller on it. Added to this is an empty bullock cart in the right of the frame that implies she is moving nowhere. The cart was the vehicle of her marriage and widowhood. A similar vehicle delivered her to Mathura’s house after their marriage. The same vehicle dumped her back to her father’s house while she became a widow. The director, however, has no sympathy for the protagonist. He has already licensed her to elope with her lover before her marriage but she fails to avail the opportunity for the sake of family pride. Now there is no room left to cry, she is a result of her own decisions. The last frame of the film seals the fate of Basanti by showing freeze shot of a flying tern. This shot is also a reference point of the film at its initial moment.

In a different level, GSP is a film having the similar approach to pure cinemas of Yasujiro Ozu, Rirwik Ghatak, Andrei Tarkovosky, Abbas Kiarostami, Mani Kaul or Nirode Mahapatra but not with Akira Kurosawa or Satyajiy Ray. Kurosawa’s later films are Japanese reconstruction of Hollywood stuff and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali is a romantic saga of poverty-driven village life - so romantic with loads of sarode, sitar and violin music so much so that the audience grows an urge to participate in the real situations. It is somewhat like Hollywood war films that also offer the same invitation to fight with every kinds of small or big weapon, kill people, burn houses and win medal. That is the material of another thesis.


(Written on occasion of Padum Barua’s 84th birth anniversary on 11 February 2008.)


The Assam Tribune published an edited version of the above write-up with an title of "Revisiting a classic" on 14 March 2008.


Thursday, February 1, 2007