Torsa Ghoshal

i) The use of representational techniques engendered in foreign historical

and geopolitical conditions, carrying definite ideological connotations to
different cultural ends in the Calcutta trilogy. Sen’s engagement with
narrative techniques adopted (and indeed adapted) from the French New
Wave, especially the stylistic devices of “interruption” employed in the
French New Wave films that include freeze frames, jump cuts, and other
techniques to interfere with the audience’s immersive experience.
ii) Sen’s approach toward “interruption” as a narrative mode with his
divergent takes on the unfolding history through the Naxalite era. Torsa
argues that the complex relation that underscores the aforementioned
oxymoron, exceptional everyday, remains the formal and the thematic
core of the Calcutta trilogies.
iii) The thematic overlaps are borne out by the struggles of the characters
who populate the storyworlds, and a closer look at their shared quests for
the “good life,” and it reinforces the shared history underpinning the
films.

French New Wave and its Aesthetic Regime

In the first film of the Calcutta Trilogy, Interview, Sen opens the film with the
story of an ordinary young man, Ranjit Mullick, and follows him through one day
as he prepares himself for an interview for a job at a foreign firm in Calcutta. The
name of the actor Mrinal Sen cast for the role is also Ranjit Mullick. Sen
incorporates a sequence where a girl aboard the same public bus in which
Ranjit is travelling to his office notices his photograph in a film magazine.
Starstruck, the girl keeps looking at Ranjit, which makes him uncomfortable,
and he bursts into a monologue looking at the camera.

- This sequence destabilizes the role of the camera that mediates objects,
people, and events.
- the transgression of diegetic levels interrupts the contract between the
spectator and the film text,
- techniques and idioms like self-reflexivity that the French New Wave’s
cinematic style affords, as demonstrated in the tram sequence where
 Ranjit talks to the camera in Sen’s film, also draw attention to the
filming and production values of the particular films (in this case,
Interview), reinforcing the film’s embeddedness in the crises and
contradictions of its culture.
- freeze frames, and intertextual references to other films, the disjointed
narrative of Interview unapologetically draws upon the right bank French
New Wave.
- When Sen borrows from the French New Wave, the techniques bring with
them their realm of signification. Thus, the trilogy’s thematic focus on the
everyday life of urban youth is in some sense inextricably linked with the
vocabulary of the French New Wave.
- The opening title cards of Sen’s third film of the Calcutta trilogy, Padatik or
The Guerilla Fighter, enumerate the multitude of problems in 70s Calcutta
including strikes, inflation, and riots. The titular captions are transposed on
the footage of newspapers emerging out of printing machines, thereby
visually referencing newspaper headlines. “Kerosene Disappears from
Market,” “Thousands of Ghost Ration Cards Seized by Police,” “Death out
of Starvation Reported,” “Factionalism Inside Political Parties,” “Exams
Disrupted,” “Government Pledged to Restore Law and Order” report each of
the title cards. The background score captures the loud noise of mobs on the
streets of the city. Presenting information without formally weaving them
into a seamless narrative, Padatik’s exposition establishes the socio-political
scenario as a key player in the film that follows the life of a Naxal activist,
Sumit, after he takes refuge in the apartment of a Naxal sympathizer, Mrs.
Mitra. That Sumit is in hiding, grounds the film in the fifth phase of the
Naxalite movement, characterized by the state’s crackdown on the Naxalite
activists.

The essence of film lies in continuity, or “flow of life,” argues Siegfried

Kracauer. Employing different aesthetic tools from the French New Wave,
Sen interrupts that flow, breaking the illusion of continuity. Sen’s takes on the
efficacy of interruptions is not so much about their faith or distrust of certain
cinematic techniques as it is about his distinct understanding of the milieu he
portrays. Cinematic techniques act as resources to read, make sense of, and
interpret the state of emergency in Calcutta. Ultimately, Sen’s divergent
aesthetics ask whether persistent violence through an era ought to be
understood as a continuation of a decadent society or as a radical break that
anticipates a new one. Further, is violence itself an extension of the everyday
life or an interruption to everyday and the ordinary in the sense of being an
exception?

Naxal Movement: State of Exception or State of Continuity?

through interruptions like strikes and blasts the internal temporality of the
revolution and its logic is repeated and this interrupted life establishes its own
everyday rhythm.

- The montage that follows the expository voiceover in Sen’s Calcutta’71

juxtaposes trams and buses, mobs of street dwellers and poverty-stricken
population walking across the city, racing horses, the movement of the type
writer, printing press, fingers strumming stringed musical instruments, firing
of guns and so on. Sequences intercutting one another establish a unique
rhythm of repeated interruptions in Calcutta ’71.

Sen’s films foreground such citizens, who are at odds with the political system for
several reasons, most of which relate to their sensibilities—symptomatic of the
sensibilities of a “generation.”

The anonymous young man from Sen’s Calcutta’71 is said to be 20 years old and
hence, evidently belongs to the student population; Ranjit (Sen’s Interview) does
not seem to have been out of college for too long either, and the same goes for
Sumit and Biman (Sen’s Padatik).

In Calcutta and Bengal more broadly, where the class system has partly relied on
education and culture has continued to be used as capital. Ranjit from the interview
does not take part in political activities, yet he is rejected by their interviewers
because they are perceived to be sympathizers of Naxalites. Ranjit’s Bengali
traditional costume, which he has to wear because his suit is in the laundry, is
interpreted as a sign of resistance against the bourgeoisie sustained by the
investments of foreign firms. Thus, owing to the active involvement of some
students like Sumit, Biman (Padatik) and the anonymous young man of
Calcutta’71 in the Naxalite movement, a paranoid establishment arbitrarily
identifies other young men as enemies even as they (Ranjit and Siddhartha) aspire
to integrate themselves with the system. Sen’s Interview, with its interlocutions
and stylistics, reinforces the idea that this is exceptional and specific to the
Calcutta of the 1970s, and accordingly voices the hope that this system ought to
change.

Calcutta’71 most notably traces the process of a society’s submergence into

poverty and squalor over decades. The film’s five parts are dated 1933, 1943, 1953
and the opening and the ending sequences are dated 1971. However, despite the
seeming trajectory of continuation, the dating of the episodes and their
segmentation into parts fractures the sense of seamless continuity. They project
these dates and decades as exceptions.

in Padatik, the final installment of Sen’s trilogy, that the continuity of oppression
and struggles is narrativized. In Padatik, Mrs. Mitra who shelters Sumit, the
Naxalite on the run, mentions that her brother had died while fighting for the
revolutionaries in Punjab. Sumit’s father had been active in the freedom struggles
and the film ends with Sumit’s father’s support for his son’s cause. Compared with
Sen’s two earlier films, Interview and Calcutta’71, Padatik even generally registers
fewer moments of self-reflexive interruptions.

The cinematic language of interruption, of course, has a transhistorical and

transnational association with class antagonism. Coherent narration in twentieth-
century films and literature has been consistently equated with the preservation of
the status quo. However, the equation among class based politics and narrative
strategies is not as straightforward. Sen’s formal strategies that overtly emphasizes
interruptions polarizes their projects, ignoring their overlapping interest in
recording the predicaments of living in a historically contingent “everyday.”

Fight for the Good Life

the characters who populate the world of Sen’s films and their shared quests.

Sen’s Ranjit, the protagonist of Interview, dreams of joining a “better” firm and
thereby suggests possibilities of filling Shyamalendu’s shoes in the fight for the
“good life.” However, the rest of the protagonists through Sen’s trilogy struggle for
“humanity,” broadly conceived. In Calcutta’71 the protagonist is dead by the time
the narrative begins but hopes that his death can trigger the changes that his life
could not. He asks the audience:

Are you listening? … Do you know why I’ve come here? I’m here to tell you that I
know who killed me. But, I won’t tell their names. I want you to find them. Why are
you without worry? Why are you so idle? Why are you so numb and dull? Aren’t
you citizens of this country?

The scenes of interrogation in both Interview and Calcutta’71, a French New

Wave-like narrative strategy—that interrupt the diegetic plane also manifest faith
in transforming the “conditio inhumana” or inhuman condition. In addition, Sen’s
narrative, with its flow interrupted by the interrogation, self-reflexively invites the
audience to join the quest for a good life.

In Sen’s Padatik both Sumit and Biman are caught within an understanding of
history which pre-supposes a political order that guarantees good life to the
educated middle-class youth. However, in this instance, Sumit recognizes the
limitations of his understanding before Biman does and, Padatik remains the only
instance in Sen’s trilogy without jarring diegetic disruptions. Sumit asks Biman a
flurry of questions pertaining to the efficacy of their mutual involvement in
political activism that they had previously thought to potentiate good life, and
Biman reacts to them as violently as Ranjit reacts to the extra-diegetic spectator’s
interrogation in Interview. Yet, none of Sen’s films openly discard the faith in
good life; the notion eludes the protagonists but seems to be available on the other
side of the historical epoch.

Conclusion

A study of Sen’s trilogy enables us to grasp the contesting and the complementary
modes each used to interpret and represent the everyday struggles characteristic of
1970s Calcutta, with its interruptions, repetitions, and repeated interruptions. Sen’s
corpus and his cinematic idiom in the Calcutta trilogy especially in the context of
world cinema, his engagement with formal strategies identified as having been
developed through international cinematic movements like the French New Wave
emerge as a point of departure. Sen’s adaptation, rejection, and modification of
such formal strategies make way for their meditation on immediate local issues. He
attempts to historically trace the world in which they and their characters lived.
The spatio-temporal coordinates that locate the Calcutta trilogy, in particular,
underscore the dialectical relations between states of exception and states of
continuity, between bare life and the impossible promise of good life.

Suranjan Ganguly

Sen applied Brecht’s theories to film, and in the process, he single-handedly

invented not only Brechtian cinema in India but the radical left-wing political
cinema as well, thereby posing the first serious challenge to the realist, liberal-
humanist aesthetic inaugurated by Satyajit Ray in 1955 with Pather Panchali/Song
of the Little Road.

From Interview onwards, Mrinal Sen began to bristle with a forbidding Brechtian
arsenal: non-linear, episodic narratives; an aggressive montage designed to rupture
the text; intrusive voice-overs; written texts and slogans; a mix of documentary and
fictive modes; sound as a counterpoint to the content of the film, and so on.

Brecht was not an adequate safeguard in preventing a film with a progressive

political agenda from being bourgeois at heart. What was needed was a cinema on
red alert, displaying an acute self-consciousness about its nature and function.
Many of Sen’s films display such a consciousness which make them unique in the
history of Indian cinema.

In Interview, he sets out to question his own role, that of his actors, the film itself,
and finally the viewer who is directly involved in the film’s self-interrogation.

Confessing to the Camera

The Autocritique, which interrogates Mrinal Sen’s function as a filmmaker occurs

in Interview when a young protagonist in a crowded bus looks directly into the
camera filming him and starts to deconstruct the film and the filmmaker. The
Brechtian moment shattered the predominantly bourgeois audience in India
(especially in West Bengal) accustomed to a transparent screen illusionism. Sen
had catered to their expectations from the start of the film by providing them with a
protagonist they could identify with. In his early twenties, Ranjit has the good
looks of a matinee idol and plenty of infectious, highspirited energy. The search for
a suit on which his job hinges seems straight out of a neorealist scenario –
sympathies are openly solicited. But before this ‘‘bourgeois’’ film can get off the
ground, it self-destructs spectacularly.

Travelling in a crowded bus, Ranjit comes across his own photograph in a popular
film magazine which a young woman is reading. She tries to match face with
image, becomes confused and Ranjit explains, looking directly at us, that it is
indeed his photograph – he is Ranjit Mullick, the actor of the same name in a film
by Mrinal Sen. He then complains of being trapped in Sen’s film, of being
hounded by him even as he goes about his daily life, and that even his search for a
job is being exploited for the camera. This is followed by a shot of Sen’s
cameraman K.K. Mahajan filming the scene. Then we hear a loud ‘‘cut’’ on the
soundtrack, the filming stops and the crew leaves. Ranjit continues talking to us.

Although it’s Ranjit who deconstructs Sen (and himself), the camera’s presence
never lets us forget that it’s the filmmaker who has orchestrated his own
deconstruction. Sen’s bark – ‘‘cut’’ – establishes his undisputed authority. In other
words, Ranjit’s confession is controlled and administered by Sen, the arch-
contriver who puts words into his mouth. Even as Ranjit complains about
exploitation, Sen attests through his presence that he is indeed exploiting his actor.
And since Ranjit will not be allowed another outburst until towards the end of the
film, we have no doubt that Sen keeps a tight reign on his creation. Thus,
paradoxically, as he deconstructs his role as filmmaker-exploiter, Sen also upholds
it. We are intensely aware that Mahajan with his camera is being filmed by Sen’s
camera. Even after the crew leaves and Ranjit slips back into his role, we know
Sen’s film is still going on. Sen’s auto-critique, then, is shown to be merely a
device, staged like the rest of the film. In other words, the filmmaker deconstructs
the auto-critique that deconstructs him.

Once Ranjit’s ‘‘confession’’ is over and he gets off the bus, the narrative doesn’t
resume at once. Sen shifts to a discourse about the film, making one of the
passengers on the bus deliver it. He is another one of Sen’s choric commentators, a
stand-in for the viewer, anticipating questions and reactions as well as critiquing
them. He has been listening to Ranjit and now he too looks at us and asks, ‘‘Do
you call this cinema? This is about you, about me.’’ His question, of course, is
deeply ironic. The viewer, still in shock at Ranjit’s ‘‘betrayal’’, is mocked for
coming to the theatre with the wrong set of expectations, for demanding from the
filmmaker a cinema which is precisely not ‘‘about you, about me’’ but about a fake
consumer dream-reality. But that’s not to say, Sen hastens to assure us through his
interlocutor, that his film is ‘‘real’’. It may deal with us and our everyday existence
but its celluloid realism cannot be ignored. The difference between this cinema and
its fake bourgeois counterpart is that this one admits to its fakeness. Sen had made
such a distinction even as Ranjit was confessing to us. There was an implied
criticism of the bourgeois filmmaker who maintains tight control over his/her
subject and manipulates the audience without ever coming clean. Sen, who too has
an ideology (Marxist) to preach, at least admits to his role.

The Actor as Double Text

Sen urges his actors to admit to the fact that they are actors. Like the protagonist
Ranjit, the key characters often retain their real-life names in a film, maintain a
fluid movement between their on-screen and off-screen personae, meet the gaze of
the viewer, talk directly to him/her and successfully thwart attempts at
identification. Performance is foregrounded through deliberate overacting,
exaggeration, inane repetition of dialogue and displays of nervous energy or hyper-
activity at the most mundane of moments. Sen tells us quite emphatically that
these are actors performing for the camera, even when they pretend, they’re
not (as in the bus scene in Interview). Thus, the actor and role are kept
separate even as they seem to merge, leaving us to decipher a double text. Sen
makes this process even more complex as he exploits the iconic stature of some
of his actors.

During the confession sequence in Interview, Ranjit tells the audience that he’s
“real” but not his mother - ‘‘she’s an actress’’. Sen insists that she is an actress by
jumpcutting to the scene in Ray’s Pather Panchali in which she, playing Sarbojaya,
breaks down when her husband, not knowing their daughter is dead, shows her the
sari he has brought for the girl. We need the intruding frame within a frame before
we reluctantly shed our disbelief that she’s not real.

Sen, fully aware of the Bengali bourgeois’ relationship with the performer, Karuna
Banerjee, whose role as Apu’s mother catapulted her into the hearts of Bengali
audiences. Quoting the moment (clip) from Pather Panchali, which is permanently
engraved in the Bengali psyche, establishes that she has no identity or existence
outside the screen – she is an actress, a beloved icon with whom all Bengalis
readily identify.

Sen further exploits her iconic stature by making her play the mother in Interview.
And here too she has two children (although they’re grownup). There is even a
scene where she chides her elder daughter just like she chided Durga, showing a
clear preference for her male child. Finally, her performance in the film has a life-
like quality which in Pather Panchali had earned her the reputation of not acting at
all.

The Bengali bourgeois viewer develops a complex relationship with the cultural
reverence for the mother figure given to Karuna Banerjee, and the filmic identity
of the mother of Ranjit in Interview, until Sen rudely intrudes, deconstructs the
whole life-like illusion and foregrounds the iconic through his clip. Karuna
Banerjee is defined henceforth as an actress-icon.

The Actor’s Interrogation

Sen attempts a more radical deconstruction of the actor in Interview when

towards the end of the film he has the viewer interrogate Ranjit about his
failed interview. If earlier in the film Ranjit provoked his viewer (the scene in
the bus), then it is the latter who now gets a chance to retaliate. By placing the
viewer inside the film, Sen dismantles the last remaining pretence at realism.
What follows is an attempt at an interactive dialogue, made all the more
intriguing by the fact that the voice of the viewer (we never see him) resembles
that of Sen. If it is indeed Sen, then we have the filmmaker masquerading as
the viewer who not only questions his own creation but gets his own back at
him for the earlier insult in the bus.

Dogged by the viewer who endlessly provokes him by asking about the interview,
Ranjit opens up. Another confession begins during which he admits that he had
dreamed the great bourgeois dream of success and tried to cater to a neocolonial
culture which judges people by the clothes they wear. Speaking directly to the
camera, he displays a newly formed political consciousness as he blames his
debacle on an unjust, exploitative society, then proceeds to smash a showroom
window and strip a mannequin dressed in Western clothes. In other words, thanks
to the mediation of the viewer, Ranjit turns activist. If he had sought to educate the
viewer about cinema and the nature of representation, then the viewer now returns
the favour by providing him with a political education.

By handing over the film to his viewer, Sen gives him the freedom to
determine how Ranjit should act and how the film should end. Ranjit is thus
manipulated by his maker and by his viewer as the film closes. This sense of
manipulation is crucial to our understanding of the scene for Sen reminds us
frequently that it’s not simply Ranjit who is under interrogation, but the actor
Ranjit Mullick as well. Ranjit’s performance is being probed, he is being
asked to explain what it’s like to be ‘‘Ranjit’’. We know just as well as the
actor does that he’s acting for the camera, that his gaze at the camera is not
simply to acknowledge the viewer but to acknowledge the camera itself.
‘‘Ranjit’’ is thus dismantled during his interrogation into Ranjit Mullick the
actor.

Blurring the Lines

Sen’s fascination with performance leads him to create juxtapositions where the
real is placed in relation to the illusory and vice versa. Since his investigations take
place on film and through film, the real is always the ‘‘real’’, its illusionism made
transparent through the debate surrounding it. Frequently, not only does the real
prove to be illusory, but the illusory often proves more ‘‘real’’ than the real.

In Interview, the exaggerated acting makes us aware that we’re watching a

performance. Sen goes even further by drawing attention to the carefully
orchestrated deception that underlies all such performances when he has
Ranjit pretend that he’s sulking because his girlfriend Bulbul has been on the
phone too long. She is taken in just as we are whereupon Ranjit bursts out
laughing: ‘‘Didn’t I act well?’’ Bulbul compares him to the reigning Bengali
matinee idol, Uttam Kumar – another one of Sen’s iconic references.

Film Begets Film

The repeated references gives a sense that film begets film, that films
constantly borrow from, refer to and engage in critiques of each other, that
they have less to do with life and almost everything to do with film as film. In
short, a film is essentially about itself. This self-referentiality is seen in
Calcutta 71, where he refers to his own cinema when he inserts Interview into
it. The film literally opens with the last shots from Interview – Ranjit
smashing the showroom window. Then the film shifts to its present – to a
Kafkaesque mock trial where Ranjit is in the dock and the mannequin with a
noose around its neck is displayed as the ‘‘victim’’ of Ranjit’s vandalism.
Thus, Calcutta 71 picks up where Interview left off and develops some of its major
concerns without alluding to the film again. There is, then, a sense of continuity, an
evolving pattern that binds Sen’s films together into a complex metacinema. His
films live within each other, resurface in new guises and often self-consciously
allude to their various resurrections.

Sen’s cross-referencing of films made by other filmmakers suggests a desire to

connect with film history, trace cinematic lineages and make distinctions
between certain kinds of cinema. When Ranjit, at the hairdresser’s, glances at
a magazine article on D.G. Phalke – the man who pioneered cinema in India –
Sen expects us to place Interview within the continuity of Indian film history
as well as outside it since the film seeks to challenge its own cinematic
inheritance.

The cross-referencing, thus, sparks off debates and discourses which are not only
pertinent to Sen’s philosophy of film but to his political agenda as well. In
Interview Sen targets the false, bourgeois cinema as he jumpcuts from the bus
passenger’s riposte – ‘‘Do you call this cinema?’’ – to a march by strikers who
belong to the Cinema Union. Film theatres playing mainstream films are closed
and garish posters covered with workers’ handbills and graffiti. Sen’s wish-
fulfilment fantasy calls for a complete boycott of such a cinema, the dismantling of
its exhibition and distribution system. In the montage that follows, he edits in shots
of peasants, workers, demon strators – all of whom participate in the struggle for a
better world. In such a world there is no place for the bourgeoisie and its fake
cinema.

Chasing the Sign

In Interview, there is an infiltration by signs, since Ranjit’s search for a better job
and a better life takes place in a consumerist world of posters, billboards and
graffiti. As he walks through this dreamscape of desire, Ranjit registers each sign
consciously as well as subconsciously. This is brought out vividly when he decides
to borrow a suit from a friend and Sen cuts to a montage of billboard signs
advertizing men’s clothing. Enamoured by the sign which defines bourgeois
prosperity for him, Ranjit pays no attention to the socio-economic and political
factors that underlie his infatuation. When the interview committee turns him down
because he didn’t wear a suit to the interview, Ranjit rejects his bourgeois dream
with a symbolic act of protest. He hurls all his anger at the biggest sign of all – the
Western-clothed mannequin in the showroom window. Once the symbol of his
aspirations, now it embodies his deepest frustrations. Ranjit has learnt to
deconstruct the sign.

Sen foregrounds signs in Interview to make us conscious of one of the most

complex sign systems of all – the cinema itself. He is especially concerned with
bourgeois cinema, its ability to not only manipulate our deepest feelings and
desires, but to define our sense of self and reality. Our daily negotiations with the
real, he suggests, are conditioned by what the cinema calls real. In other words, the
audience’s experience of the world is mediated by our experience of the movies.

When in a crowded bus Ranjit catches a pickpocket in the act, Sen cuts to the sign
on the bus – ‘‘Prince’’ – and then to the face on a poster of a glowering movie
villain. Is ‘‘prince’’ a reference to ‘‘prince of pickpockets’’ or to Ranjit the hero?
It’s not clear, but the poster suggests that Ranjit’s heroics are essentially movie
heroics, a grand performance at best. Similarly, when Bulbul bursts out laughing
on hearing that Ranjit can’t imagine putting on the traditional Bengali headress at
their wedding, Sen matchcuts her laughing face with that of a laughing woman on
a poster. Even such ‘‘involuntary’’ human reactions are suspect in Sen’s poster
world. Finally, Sen doesn’t want us to forget that Ranjit Mullick, the actor as well
as his on-screen persona (the man who reads all the signs wrong) in Interview, are
both signs within the film’s sign system. With that awareness, our deconstruction
of ‘‘Ranjit’’ is complete.

Invocation of other arts

Sen’s concern with the sign and the problematic nature of representation is
reinforced through his allusions to art forms other than film, such as literature,
painting and photography.
In Interview Sen focuses on painting when he turns Bulbul into an art student who
paints still lifes. When she talks animatedly on the phone with her classmate
Anjana, who has just returned from a sea-resort, Sen cuts to Anjana’s seascapes.
On the soundtrack we hear the sound of the sea and a boatman’s song, then there’s
a cutaway to the real sea which Sen is comparing with the copy. Since her work
mingles realist and abstract motifs, the sea is transformed into a private symbol –
it’s Anjana’s sea. By making such a separation, Sen reminds us how in the
comforting darkness of the movie theatre, caught off-guard, we easily confuse the
copy with the original.

Bulbul’s preference for the still life is echoed in Sen’s preference for the
documentary still photograph which he frequently slips into his narratives.
Magnified on screen, such an image brings reality up close for scrutiny. Sen’s still
lifes which mostly focus on starving faces and bodies are designed to shock. By
suspending the narrative with a photograph, Sen expects the viewer to
compare fiction with documentary fact and thus redefine his/her relationship
to film and reality. And yet the impact of such images is qualified by the viewer’s
awareness that these are after all images seen on film, twice removed from reality.
However, close up, reality is only a sign, mediated by the frame.