ওয়াশিংটন বাংলা রেডিও Washington Bangla Radio USA

By Shoma A Chatterji/IBNS

Kolkata, Nov 3 (IBNS) The upcoming Kolkata Film Festival (KFF) has defined a new theme among its screening programmes- the city itself as captured in the celluloid by the legends like Mrinal Sen. 

Under the title Calcutta/Kolkata, the theme will try to catch the city's transformation over the decades and its portrayal on screen. 

A city is not just a city. It opens up a secret door to another city and then another small window to reveal the innards of yet another city much like Pramathesh Chandra Barua kept opening one door after another as a symbolized expression of freedom in New Theatres’ Mukti many years ago. 

These cities-within-a-city are layers of ethnic lifestyles specific to these pockets of people that sometimes change and sometimes do not.

Historic films with the city as a character chosen under the theme are Mrinal Sen's Interview and Calcutta ‘71 and Ray's Mahanagar, Pratidwandi, Jana Aranya and Seemabadhha. 

Slightly diverse in nature, history and topography are Gautam Ghose's Kaalbela and  two of his documentaries - The Hungry Autumn and The Image-makers of Calcutta.

The former portrays Kolkata on the aftermath of the Naxalite movement. The latter tackles the culture-specific potters’ colony of Kumartuli traditionally occupied by the sculptors of the Gods and Goddesses during festival time.

Interview explores the journey – physical, emotional, metaphorical – of a young man through the streets by lanes of Calcutta from morning to late night, hunting for a proper suit to be worn for an interview.

This multi-layered journey offers the audience a glimpse into the varying moods of the city. The camera in this film turns into an investigative journalist, a social and political observer and finally, a silent commentator on the way things are for some serious minded young people in a milieu where most youngsters are misled by extremist aspirations of changing the world through the mouth of the gun. 

The male voice-over the hero communicates with is the author-director questioning him, interrogating him and judging him. The structure of the film leaves its linear, narrative style and evolves into an anti-narrative abstraction suffused with concrete images in keeping with the seething, simmering and then bursting anger of the hero who becomes a microcosm of the city, simmering and seething with the restive anger of its frustrated youth. 

He smashes a show window and strips a suited mannequin inside, symbolizing rebellion against the colonial mindset that insists on an English suit being worn at an interview long after India’s independence. 

Cut to a battle-cry of Inquilab Zindabad on the soundtrack with a collage of visuals flashing on screen showing slogan-raising masses in procession, zeroing in on protesting fists and faces.

Calcutta ’71 was originally based on five short stories. These were Courtroom, penned by Sen himself, Atmahatyar Adhikar, by the late Manik Bandopadhyay, Angar by Prabodh Kumar Sanyal, Smuggler by Samaresh Bose and Ekattorer Galpo by theatre personality Ajitesh Bandopadhyay.

Sen commented, “I have noticed that social anger is of two kinds – one is to maintain the status quo, the other is to break it. My business here is to make a point through and in Calcutta ’71.

"Despite the external, surface irregularity, there must be an artistic unity somewhere. I believe in this and try to maintain it through my films."

Mrinal Sen said he had discovered that the physical manifestation of poverty is the same everywhere, at all times. "It is only the mind that changes from 1933 through 1943 and then from 1953 to 1971 – a span of forty years.”

When the film was finally made, Sen decided to cut out the story he wrote and the one written by Ajitesh Bandopadhyay.

The narrator is a twenty-year-old who looks into the camera to unfold the thousand-year-old history of the city. His walk is a walk across centuries. He assumes the role of both narrator and interpreter commenting on the thousand-year history of exploitation and poverty.

Sen chose Calcutta to portray this tragic history over other Indian cities because for him, Calcutta symbolized the city that has/had lived through this harrowing history. 

He chose Calcutta also because this was the city that had grown on him and the city he was the closest to. 

About the trilogy Interview (1971), Calcutta ’71 (1972) and Padatik (1973), Sen said, “The trilogy shares a new political awareness that
is so palpable in Afro-Asian countries."

"In Padatik, without losing focus on the need to have a considerable fight against all kinds of reaction, I have done what can be called soul-searching. Is everything going smooth on the anti-Establishment front? Isn’t it time to examine the validity of the mandates on leadership? Isn’t it necessary at times to go against the tide? The line between slander and self-criticism I know is a thin one. While making Padatik, I was aware of it.”

These films reflect the terrible time Calcutta was passing through. By this time, Sen had developed his command and control over the craft of cinema, often coming across in his imaginative use of the sound montage, photographs and allegorical devices.