Modernism by Other Means: the films of Amit Dutta – Srikanth Srinivasan (Lightcube, 2020)

Srikanth Srinivasan’s (aka JAFB who writes at his legendary site The Seventh Art) first monograph is a great book about Indian cinema. It is a great book about a filmmaker. Srikanth lists himself as a film critic on the jacket of his book, which he rightly is, but this work is very much that of an accomplished and nuanced film scholar, and indeed which has often been the striking characteristic of his eclectic film writings over a period of fifteen years and counting. I still don’t think he gets the credit and attention that he deserves, underlining the cultural discourse in which film writing is narrowly canonized; remaining within tenuous, highfalutin parameters, with much of it tipped into the favour of Anglo-centric feels.

I first came across Srikanth’s work in 2007 when I was starting to use the internet to write about film, at my first site pretentiously titled ‘Ellipsis: The Accents of Cinema’, which is now defunct. Those were the years when film writers would regularly crawl across the internet to leave comments to new posts in the hope of initiating a conversation and dialogue. Sadly, such diligence and commitment came to an end with the rise of social media and expressly Twitter, which kind of ruined what could have potentially been something quite significant in terms of sustaining a connected global cinephilia with the space to let writers develop their own style and forge a readership. Now with Twitter, everyone seems to be barking out the same film rhetoric, much of it lazily recycled and generally lacking nuance.

Anyhow, if you have been following Srikanth’s adventures over the years, which also saw him take a cultural hiatus to France, his interests in experimental Indian film and filmmakers, about which he has written extensively, continues to elucidate a major blind spot when it comes the prevailing film discourse on Indian cinema, which as he notes in his introduction, is inclined towards ‘mainstream and Parallel Cinema’. I necessarily don’t agree with this point as I would reason the scholarly work on Parallel Cinema is in dire need of resuscitation and further study, with much of the focus having shifted to the much feted Indie scene. And although monographs on filmmakers like Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani and Shyam Benegal have been far more forthcoming over the past ten years, the non-linear history of Parallel Cinema remains relatively unexplored. Nonetheless, I would reason Srikanth’s monograph occupies a new space, carving out a critical insight that forges a wider cultural intersectional understanding of Dutta’s work, articulated through the elegant, intellectual and strident analytical prose.

Indeed, Srikanth points to the short shrift that experimental Indian film has been given, something he dually rectifies with what is an accessible, exceptional and detailed investigative reading of director Amit Dutta’s output, arguably one of India’s most important contemporary artists working today, and who in many ways extended the premature iconoclastic creative experiments of Parallel Cinema. Having been made with the co-operation of Dutta is significant. Overcoming the politics of access which often remains as an obstacle when it comes to researching or writing on the histories of alternative Indian cinema is telling in the comprehensive and rigorous approach Srikanth takes, journeying chronologically through Dutta’s work and showing us his evolution as an artist who has worked almost in isolation from the mainstream and relatedly showing a disillusionment with the dubious curatorial choices and agendas of film festivals. It is worth noting the monograph broadens and consolidates the retrospective Srikanth curated on Dutta’s work in 2017.

The formative period at the FTII which forms the basis of the first chapter that looks at Dutta’s early films draws out the connections between oppositional film practices, the ability to experiment at length at a privileged institution and how Dutta’s early inspirations drew heavily on his own experiences and expressly ‘indigenous myths’. Pertinently, Srikanth identifies how the creative manipulations of time and space would become a defining theme in Dutta’s work, crafting a ritualistic and measured tone buoyed by a slow rhythm. As Srikanth works meticulously through Dutta’s films, the lucid prose maps a wider cultural framework that connects the traditions of Indian art to an idea of using film as a self-reflexive prism with which to deconstruct narrative, genre and film style as something autobiographical in nature. And what Srikanth teases out so vividly is how real life artists including painters become a defining concrete and spectral presence in Dutta’s work, a constant return to investigate folk tales and mythology whereby it becomes intrinsic to his mixed media methods of communication and investigation. If anything what Dutta’s output demonstrates is how infantile and possibly regressive much of the so called alternative Indian cinema actually is. And in this respect, Dutta’s work seems almost revolutionary, occupying a futuristic pro-filmic space.

With the chapter on ‘Man’s Woman and Other Stories (2009)’, Srikanth argues for the sociological dimension of Dutta’s work, although somewhat reluctantly because of the lack of overt political engagement throughout his work, a hallmark of many avant-garde artists. Given Srikanth’s extensive and impressive film knowledge and understanding of international cinema, he is able to draw out the wider intertextual connections that can often go amiss, referencing films by Ray, Greenway, Tarkovsky, Resnais etc. and how they inform Dutta’s directorial choices, an aspect of the monograph that anchors itself in the riches of hybridity, fusion and exchange. The broader cine-geography onto which Srikanth maps Dutta’s work reiterates a cultural duality in which internationalism and indigenous practices are part of an Indian art tradition and aesthetic consciousness that stretches back to the 1920s. Undeniably this monograph examines Dutta’s capacity to create new art forms through the prism of experimental filmmaking and thereby the recurring and informed links to Indian art history becomes an essential feature since one could reason Dutta is part of a late new modernism.

Alongside the delineation of key themes (nature and civilization, memory, space) and shifting patterns of working with technology, there is a deep understanding of aesthetics including the pursuit for an organic film style that runs throughout the chapters with astutely exhaustive close textual analysis of key sequences from virtually all of Dutta’s films. The evolution of a new film style ‘free of cinematic influences’ as Srikanth notes becomes an abiding argument that is developed throughout the chapters and contestably emerges as allusive to the way Dutta has constantly metamorphized as an artist. The chapter on ‘The Seventh Walk’, a remarkable project Dutta made in 2013, is in many ways key to the monograph because Srikanth is able to argue why this work is ‘the nearest he has ever come to immersing himself in the natural world’.

Modernism by other means is a fitting title for an artist who is defiantly contemporary, a polymath whom Srikanth understands and probes broadly with a final stretch of the monograph dedicated to non-film output, all of which is decisive in forming a fully rounded and intimate portrait of Dutta. Srikanth Srinivasan’s book on Amit Dutta is an invaluable foundational text for anyone wanting to explore the rich contours of Indian experimental film and is also an indispensable authorial study that opens up a far reaching interrogation and critical awareness of modernity and its relationship with contemporary filmmaking in India today.

https://shop.lightcube.in/Modernism-By-Other-Means

THE SEVENTH WALK (Dir. Amit Dutta, 2013, India) – Modulations of Light & Space

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In Amit Dutta’s The Seventh Walk (2013) the camera meanders, weaves and glides through a forest, replicating and distorting the gaze of New Delhi based Indian artist, Paramjit Singh. The dolly shots, evocatively staged, depict the spaces of the forest as oneiric and mysterious. There is sensuality at work in Dutta’s ghostly imagining of the forest, a metaphysical wonderland accentuated through the amplification of a rich non-diegetic soundscape. The morning birdcall, chirping crickets, the whistling wind, bells chiming are some of the sounds that Dutta switches between, imbuing the spaces of the forest with a mystical ambience. The experiential of walking through and inhabiting the forest and related spaces is tactile and sensory, while the repeated emphasis on trees, sunlight, stones, and water conjuring a hypnotic rhythm. At one point, as Paramjit sits in a room, a bottle begins to levitate, and a new realm is projected, one that replicates the subconscious. Blending the imagined work of the painter to real details of the forest, a surrealist tone leads to the materialisation of unforeseen elements such as the young girl dressed in primary yellow, and who at one point magically floats, Dutta choosing to frame this particular moment of flight with the camera fixed to a pair of knitted slippers. Imitating the detailed aesthetics of a series of paintings, the modulations of light and space and striking usage of planimetric framing emerge as a visual pattern that transforms formalist experimental preoccupations into something waywardly poetic.

THIS SHAKING KEEPS ME STEADY (Dir. Shehrezad Maher, 2018, Pakistan / U.S.)

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In a measured yet painterly wide shot towards the end of what is a hybridised work Maher trains her erudite eye under a bridge, a sort of non-space with a phantasmal ambiance. The familiar concrete structure of the bridge and the calm waters of the river act as a visual memory to a story narrated to us by an ambulance driver. The story is about a woman who tried to commit suicide jumping from a bridge. It is a traumatic memory that forms a composite of recollections by ambulance drivers that are juxtaposed to fictional reconstructions of real life tragedies for television. Closer to an atmospheric and experimental video essay than a documentary, Maher’s choice to fragment recollections into a non-linear narration lets us hear the neglected voices of Karachi as distinctly porous. Re-enactments staged for news media and TV dramas point to the artifice of performativity but this betrayal of reality is seemingly challenged by the ways in which memory also distorts history. But it is the stories narrated by the ambulance drivers that resonate with you long after the film has ended, a reminder of the ways in which an impoverished underclass props up a society with unsung acts of altruism.

You can find out more about Shehrezad Maher’s work here: http://www.shehrezadmaher.com/

 

GHASHIRAM KOTWAL (Dir. K. Hariharan, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop, Saeed Mirza, 1976, India) – Experiments in Time & Space

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Watching Ghashiram Kotwal is equivalent to a punch in the face, cinematically speaking of course, since here is a film, a belligerent work in terms of parallel cinema, antithetical to Indian Cinema. It was a film all but forgotten, salvaged from the Berlin film archive, and restored. Yet again preservation intervened in the historiography of Indian Cinema, revising the past. Ghashiram Kotwal seems like a seminal work now, a crossroads in terms of ideological and aesthetic experimentation, arriving at the peak of the parallel cinema art film movement in 1976. Although the FFC had nothing to do with Ghashiram Kotwal in terms of funding, a natural project to support really, they did help to put in place the necessary conditions for such an experimental film to be realized by a group of emboldened, agit-prop filmmakers coming out of the film institute in Pune. In many ways, Ghashiram Kotwal may not have been possible without Bhuvan Shome or more significantly Mani Kaul’s Uski Roti. The critical success of both films, part of the New Cinema Movement (NCM), and the work of the Film Divisions of India, commissioning experimental shorts facilitated an age of iconoclastic esotericism. The rules of Indian Cinema were being broken, re-written and assimilated with the influences of European cinema, chiefly the long take cinema of Hungarian Miklos Jancso, into a counter cinema that for a brief moment proposed conventions could be subverted to enunciate existing social and political torments.

Ghashiram Kotwal is a difficult film to position and would in some respects fall into the parallel cinema category. However, it is more evidently a radical work that has no ambitions to occupy a middle ground. Experiments in formalism came most boldly from Kaul in the 1970s and his involvement with Ghashiram Kotwal was critical for the film finding both financing and an aesthetic unity. The Yukt film cooperative only made two films; Ghashiram Kotwal and later Arvind Desai Ki Ajeeb Dastan (although this is clearly a parallel cinema film), Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s directorial debut, released in 1978. Yukt (which means strength) was merely an isolated group and the cooperative, made up of 16 members including co-director K. Hariharan and actor Om Puri, rose financing for the project through a bank manager contact of Kaul. Such creative freedom instinctively meant as a collective they could take risks. Hariharan says that Kaul was very much the creative senior, someone they greatly admired, an established filmmaker, who helped to guide and shape the project. Equally participatory was the role played by Kamal Swaroop and Saeed Mirza in developing ideas central to the film.

The collective also drew directly from the events of the time in India. The Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, lasting between 75 and 77, violated the constitution, leading to an outcry from the cultural community. Ghashiram Kotwal was originally ‘a play chronicling the Peshwa regime in western India’, featuring a plot in which the Prime Minister Nana Phadnavis appoints Ghashiram ‘as a senior police official cum espionage agent’ in an attempt to hold on to power in a territory being challenged by the arrival of the British. The parallels with Indira Gandhi’s tyrannical rule were striking; a hegemonic impulse articulated by the use of the police as a means of manifest repression found a metonymic parallel in the way Nana used Ghashiram to enforce terror amongst the Brahmins. Such timely and considered ideological engagement avoids polemicizing, instead relying on a self reflexive approach, combining some of the dance traditions of Indian culture with Brechtian devices (the omniscient narrator, title cards, direct camera address to name a few) to fuse together a postcolonial non-linear dialogue of history and politics that is both diachronic and synchronic. Just like the impact of the IPTA in the 1950s led to a more concerted ideological and aesthetic engagement with cinema, producing some affecting neorealist work, a similar precedent was clearly in work with the 1970s Indian Experimental Theatre of Badal Sircar, a major creative influence on the film.

There are instances in the film that spuriously communicate Kaul’s repeated authorial interests with temporal and spatial disjuncture, evident most strikingly in the moment when Nana (Mohan Agashe) and Ghashiram (Om Puri) meet for the first time. In a classic Kaul move, a very trivial and ordinary action, the meeting between two characters, is disrupted in terms of time and space, making us look at the meeting through a new spectatorial gaze. Thematically, Nana and Ghashiram emerge as a mirror image, morphing into one. Kaul frames this first meeting in such thematic terms, obscuring our view of both characters, denying us the predictable reaction shots used to fill in the traditional dramatic narrative space. At one point in the sequence, Ghashiram is completely obscured by Nana’s symmetrical position in the frame, producing a spatial ellipsis that creates a momentary disjuncture, instructing us of their ideological synchronicity.

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Yet by choosing to film from the back of Nana is also significant, it is the master, the one who rules, that seems to literally swallow up Ghashiram into his treachery. In many ways, this sequence violates conventional framing but its experimentational tone is very much implemented at the service of key themes: the contestation of power, and the ostensibly eternal master and slave dichotomy. Even more audacious is the final shot of the film, lasting for an uninterrupted, continuous ten minutes, and directly inspired by the cinema of Miklos Jancso, and which in the opinion of K. Hariharan is unique in film history since it ‘must remain the world’s longest shot on a standard reel of 1,000 feet to be shot by four camera operators’. In this final shot, the camera completes a 360-degree movement at least four times, capturing the way history unfolds disruptively, and also witnessing a subdued transference of power, the British coming to the fore.

Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, based in Berlin, has over 8,000 films in its archives. To date, Arsenal has restored two significant Indian films, Deepa Dhanraj’s Kya Hua Is Shahar Ko? (1986) and Ghashiram Kotwal. Both of these films have been released by Arsenal on DVD (region free luckily) after receiving retrospective screenings at the Berlin film festival.

Bibliography

Accompanying DVD Booklet by Arsenal; featuring an interview with K. Hariharan conducted by Shai Heredia, filmmaker and curator.