NO LOVE FOR CINEMA

Cinema’s Scars
So it seems that the distress of Partition, ingrained in Ghatak’s very ability to perceive his
surroundings, combined with an interest in extending the artistic possibilities of the cinematic
medium, crystallised into something quite fascinating and unprecedented in Indian cinema, which
was not well appreciated by many of his peers. What makes it so fascinating for me is not only a
new outlook on the partitioning of India but, more importantly, the consequences of this for the
cinema as a medium. It is as if the very frames and coordinates of his cinema regularly manifest the
fracturing that took place with Partition. Cinema itself, it seems, must bear the scars of Partition as
much as any individual or nation-state.

A passing train cuts deafeningly across the background of a shot as Neeta sits with Sanat by the
river in Meghey Dhaka Tara, overpowering the soundtrack entirely with its travelling wheels, piercing
whistle and screeching breaks so as to drown out their conversation, sabotaging the spectator’s
ability to hear. The sound of the railway, unreasonably loud given its position in the very background
of the image, breaks open the soundtrack as if a crack has formed and the train has surged through
it. At a later moment in Meghey Dhaka Tara, the camera positions close up under Neeta’s chin as
the light shines on her glistening hair, giving the impression that Neeta is looking upwards to the
twinkling light that reflects off her hair like stars. Suddenly a whip sounds repeatedly on the
soundtrack over Shankar and Neeta’s singing, prompting her to sob uncontrollably for the first time
in the film, under the burden she carries supporting her family and losing her own dreams. Here
again, it is as if the soundtrack pierces the image, breaking its beauty and breaking Neeta too,
breaking her down in fact. Meghey Dhaka Tara has an absolutely revolutionary soundtrack, which at
times reaches an incredible saturation point. I felt, at times, as if the soundtrack would swell open or
burst, almost as song, spoken word, the sound of Neeta’s dizziness, drums and her tuberculosis-
induced coughing rose to compete in the mix. Bhaskar Chandavarkar gives an excellent account of
Ghatak’s experimental work on the soundtrack:

While mixing, he heard the whine of a projector leaking in from the projection room. Obviously, the
glass pane on the projection room window was missing. A live track was also being fed into the
mixer from the studio. Ritwik heard the whine a while and then advised the recordist to leave it that
way. (25)

In a portrait of Bimal left waiting on a railway platform, Ajantrik generates a framing that reminds me
of a “dynamic construction”: Bimal’s head is cut off from his body while the rest of the frame registers
clear sky. The particular angle of framing in this scene operates a kind of de-framing in the form of
an abnormal point of view. Bimal’s floating head, framed with a piece of the sky, offers us a slice of
space, emphasising the quality of framing as cutting reminding us that the “closed system” of the
frame “is never absolutely closed”. Rather, the internal composition of this unusually angled close-up
denotes a Deleuzian “affective framing”, carrying off with a scrap of the sky and forming between it
and the face, a “virtual conjunction” . Bimal’s face, extracted from its spatio-temporal coordinates,
carries “its own space-time”.

Here we must return to Kumar Shahani’s comments about why Ghatak was such a vital force for
young independent filmmakers such as Shahani who have since achieved significant influence and
support for their important work. As Shahani has explained, Ritwik Ghatak was “disenchanted with
those of his colleagues who wanted to maintain a false unity and were not, implicitly, pained enough
by the splintering of every form of social and cultural values and movement.” What must be
acknowledged is that Ghatak’s recognition and incorporation of this splintering into his work may
have borne the cinema some scars but this scarring, this splintering and fracturing of a false unity in
the cinema, generated significant new growth and development. Further, recognising and
embodying the truth of his own experience of Partition in the cinema, forged connections that were
profoundly true to the experience of Indian people, rather than what Shahani describes as a
“decorative Indianess”. The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema describes Ajantrik as:

…a new investigation into film form, expanding the refugee experience into a universalised leitmotiv
of cultural dismemberment and exile evoking an epic tradition drawing on tribal, folk and classical
forms (Buddhist sculpture, Baul music, the khayal).

This statement is key to understanding Ghatak because it links the refugee experience – the
experience of exile – to folk and epic forms which together expand into an investigation of film form.
These are the key elements of Ghatak’s originality in the cinema – a potent mix. The folding in of all
of these aspects produces cinema true to Ghatak’s experience of India in a form that others have
found incredibly productive, as Shahani’s comments illustrate.

Meta-Cinema
Ghatak had a philosophical attitude to cinema – his work asks the question “What is Cinema?”
Fleeting concurrence is the mainstay of Bimal’s encounters with other individuals in Ajantrik. An
incredible yet fleeting encounter occurs between a woman Bimal collects once deserted by the “local
Romeo” and her train arriving on the platform in front of her. This encounter, well outside the central
drive of Ajantrik, has captured me completely. It deserves lengthy attention. A woman stares straight
ahead at the edge of the railway platform in close-up as a train arrives at her station. Passing train
carriages block the light and cast a panel of shadow so that the area underneath her eyes becomes
darker, as if she is exhausted, harrowed, under-slept. The darkness under her eyes disappears
when panels of light, unblocked by the train, travel over her face and again return with the passing
shadows. The alternation of light and shadow traces the movement of the train onto her face. The
train slows down as it pulls into the station, its pace measured by this movement of shadow.

This woman’s face in Ajantrik becomes a reflective surface onto which the train’s rhythm is traced,
projected. The train’s locomotion is reconfigured, temporally, by this trace. Her face, through the
aspect of chiaroscuro, not only reflects the train but also refracts it into an expressive series. What
results is that the train’s conquest of space and time is turned off-course towards a quality that is
outside its coordinates. The optical effects rendered upon this moment render the railway station and
the woman, together, an “any-space-whatever”, suspending their individuation to the creation of
affect, performing the quality of the railway, rather than its function.

The abandoned woman in Ajantrik has been stripped of her jewelry and status losing her distinctive
adornments. It is the ordinary blandness of her features, unadorned, that allow her face to operate
as screen for the projection of the shadow of the train. Yes, this moment of conjunction between face
as screen and train as projection is also a meta-cinematic image. The ratio of light to dark projected
onto her face is approximately 90% dark and 10% light – exactly the ratio of light travelling through
the film projector. The locomotion of the projector and the train merge and these moving shadows
become a form of dynamic framing – the frame as dynamic micro-movement – the frame passing
over a still face.

The affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face. […] There is no close-up of the
face, the face is in itself close-up, the close-up is by itself face and both are affect, affection-image.

The railway, under Ghatak’s incredible close-up of a face, becomes an affection-image.

This kind of transformative work Ghatak achieves in Ajantrik, in which the railway becomes the
projector and a human face becomes a cinema screen, shifts machines so that the apparatuses of
the cinema become locatable inside the image. Meghey Dhaka Tara likewise performs incredible
transformations, this time between the river and Neeta, who is the “Cloud-Capped Star” of the film’s
title. The relationship between the river and Neeta begins as the running water of the river sparkles
behind the title sequence like exquisitely formed twinkling stars. Later on, the moonlight reflecting off
the river filters across Neeta’s face in the darkness of her bedroom suggest the passing clouds over
the night sky and over her face. As Neeta’s situation worsens – with Sanat, her sweetheart, marrying
her sister Geeta – tiny particles of light stream through the thin gaps between the bamboo strips
woven to form the family hut, twinkling in a way that recalls the river of the title sequence, as
Shankar and Neeta sing together. The camera closes in on Neeta’s despairing face, the light source
catching her hair in the dark so that it becomes filled with sparkles. The stars shift from their source
in the river (we never see them in the sky) to surround Neeta completely at her most desperate
moments – her face clouded in distress but shrouded by tiny twinkling, brilliant reflections.

Under the Influence – You Are a Fence Yourselves

It seems that despite Ghatak’s claim to have been drawn to the cinema by the size of the audience
he could reach, as Satyajit Ray has noted, “Ritwik had the misfortune to be largely ignored by the
Bengali film public in his lifetime” (36). While Ghatak has been classified as a “Great Director” by the
likes of Satyajit Ray, he was not placed in this category because of his popularity. With incredible
moments such as the one described above between an abandoned woman and an approaching
train, Ghatak’s most unwavering influence was on other filmmakers. While very few of Ghatak’s films
were influential at the box office during his lifetime, his influence as a teacher at the FTII had a
profound impact upon the trajectory of Indian independent cinema. Ghatak was an influential lecturer
and vice principal at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune from 1966 to 1967. He
says of this time:

The time I spent working at the Film Institute in Pune was one of the happiest periods of my life. The
young students come there with a great deal of hope, and a large dose of mischief by which I mean,
“There’s a new teacher, let’s give him a bad time!” I found myself right in their midst. I cannot
describe the pleasure I experienced winning over these young people and telling them that films can
be different. Another thing that pleased me a lot was that I helped to mold many of them. My
students are spread all over India. Some have made a name for themselves, some haven’t. Some
have stood on their own feet, some have been swept away.

The last film Ghatak completed was Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (1974) in which Ghatak played the lead
role himself – an alcoholic intellectual with various nervous conditions, a state for which he was
notorious among students. Much loved by students but suffering difference with the establishment,
he lasted at FTII for only a few years. Ghatak passed away on 6 February, 1976, at the early age of
fifty, leaving many unfinished projects. Always at odds with his requisite establishment, it seems,
from IPTA to FTII, his influence was more wide reaching than might be expected. Reading recently
Lalitha Gopalan’s book on action genres in contemporary Indian cinema, Cinema of Interruptions, I
came across a reference to the influence of a group of directors Ghatak is famed for fathering:

Consciously setting themselves apart from commercial cinema, films by Adoor Gopalkrishnan, G.
Aravindan, Mrinal Sen, Girish Kasarvalli, Kumar Shahani, and Mani Kaul focused on social and
political antagonisms to narrate their tales of disappointment with the postcolonial state while also
conveying hopes for a different society. […] [T]heir films drew the urban elite to cinemas and shaped
film-viewing habits by encouraging the audience to focus more intently on the screen. A substantial
number of commercial films made in the late 1980s borrowed from these film making practices while
continuing to improve on conventions of entertainment.

In line with this account, we could say that Ghatak’s legacy has been a kind of cinema that invites us
“to focus more intently on the screen”. I like this idea. Interestingly, it might suggest a mode of
contemplation asked of in front of great works of art, echoing Ghatak’s own claims to be an artist first
and a filmmaker second. Certainly he has snubbed any value in ”entertainment” as a filmmaking
practice:

I do not believe in ‘entertainment’ as they say it or slogan mongering. Rather, I believe in thinking
deeply of the universe, the world at large, the international situation, my country and finally my own
people. I make films for them. I may be a failure. That is for the people to judge.

So Ghatak’s cinema asks us to contemplate “deeply of the universe” – to “focus more intently” rather
than be “entertained”. This requirement appears to have proved unyielding in his lifetime and
perhaps, still, for many of us today. So how can we access Ritwik Ghatak? How can we begin to
watch his cinema? We can make an effort to judge differently if we can allow ourselves into to his
particular cinematic rhythmic inflections.

To this end, I must canvas here my own encounter with what Gopalan has described as Ghatak’s
ability to make us “focus more intently on the screen”. There is a scene in Ajantrik in which two taxi
drivers sit atop their car bonnets and sing (to themselves, it seems) ”from their guts” in deep and
bellowing voices, the one trying to drown out the other, in a contrapuntal cacophony. The whimsical
singing of the two taxi drivers opens up a momentary pause, a delay in the movement of the film.
Somehow, the camera frames this moment of vocal interweaving in Ajantrik so that it waits upon the
drivers. It is scenes such as this one that have asked me to look and look again at Ghatak’s cinema,
to inquire repeatedly into what Ghatak has achieved on the screen. I say that the camera waits or
lingers on these two taxi drivers, partly because it is me who doesn’t want this moment to end. It is
me who holds onto this singing so that it lingers in the images that follow, me that tries to squeeze
out the duration of this scene and stretch it from within, indulging.

We can acknowledge that the spectator can open up a film by the desire to suspend and hold onto
an image. Indeed, I must admit my own bias in writing this profile towards Ajantrik, a film for which I
hold so much affection that it clouds my articulation of much of Ghatak’s other work which is less
accessible to me. I too am a culprit of putting up a fence to Ghatak’s experimentations.

You might have been a bit more indulgent towards us if you only knew how many fences we have to
cross to make a film. […] Filmmakers like us will be gratified if people just accept the fact that we are
fenced in. […] You are a fence yourselves, the most ominous, perhaps.

Examining the fences we put in place against Ghatak’s ambitious work should begin to open us up
to this cinema. We too must bear his cinema’s scars if we are to learn from his vision.

Filmography

All films are in the Bengali language and are black and white unless otherwise stated.

Feature Films:

Nagarik (The Citizen) (1953) released posthumously on 20 September, 1977

Ajantrik (Pathetic Fallacy or The Unmechanical) (1957–8)

Bari Thekey Paliye (Running Away From Home) (1959)

Meghey Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star) (1960)

Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime or E-Flat) (1961)

Subarnarekha (The Golden Line) (1962)

Titas Ekti Nadir Naam (A River Named Titus) (1973)

Jukti Takko Aar Gappo (Arguments and a Story or Reason, Debate and a Tale) (1974) released
posthumously on 30 September, 1977

Documentaries:

Adivasiyon Ka Jeevan Srot (The Life of the Adivasis) (1955) in Hindi, commissioned by the
Government of Bihar

Bihar Ke Darshaniya Sthan (Places of Historic Interest in Bihar) (1955) in Hindi, commissioned
by the Government of Bihar

Scientists of Tomorrow (1967)

Yey Kyon (Why or The Question) (1970 ) in Hindi

Amar Lenin (My Lenin) (1970)

Puruliar Chhau (The Chhau Dance of Purulia) (1970)

Short Films:

Fear (1965) in Hindi

Rendezvous (Rajendra Nath Shukla, 1965) in Hindi; diploma film made under Ghatak’s supervision

Civil Defence (1965) at Film & Television Institute of India, Pune

Durbar Gati Padma (The Turbulent Padma) (1971)

Unfinished Projects:

Features:

Arupkatha/Bedeni (1950–3)

Kato Ajanare (All the Unknown) (1959)

Bagalar Bangadashan (Bagala’s Discovery of Bengal) (1964)

Ranger Golam (The Knave of the Trump) (1968)

Documentaries:

Ustad Alauddin Khan (1963) documentary about the musician

Indira Gandhi (1972)

Ramkinkar: A Personality Study (1975) colour

A note on obtaining these films:

Ritwik Ghatak’s films are difficult to locate so I’ve included a few directions here. Ghatak’s early
feature, Ajantrik, is available in the Australian Film, Television and Radio School library for borrowing
in Sydney. Nagarik, Meghey Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Titas Ekti Nadir Naam are available
through the National Film and Video Lending Service at ACMI in Melbourne.

Meghey Dhaka Tara and Titas Ekti Nadir Naam are available for purchase at the British Film
Institute website. Several other of his feature films are available at the British Film Institute for
lending. Otherwise, more films may be found in the archives of the Film and Television Institute of
India in Pune. FTII may also be able to give directions on how to contact the Ritwik Memorial Trust.