Teaching ‘Sholay’

I suppose it must have been done before, considering that Sholay was released in 1975,  has several texts written about the movie and my overall lack of awareness about the happenings of the film education world.

But I took a shot at ‘teaching’ Sholay yesterday the local Indian Film and Television Institute of India. We screened the 204 minute long ‘Director’s Cut’ of Sholay to the freshman’s class in Film Direction. Its an interesting version that even I hadn’t seen before. The Jaya flashback and Amitabh’s funeral pyre added a lot more to the movie.

It’s a classic, so in a short while the students were pretty much enveloped by the movie. We took a short break at the film’s interval point, where I told them about the uniqueness of the Indian convention of the interval.

We completed the screening, broke for lunch and then resumed to discuss the movie in detail.

I sort of had a free-wheeling class- it overlapped conventional notions of film appreciation, scriptwriting and directing. Hopefully giving an insight to the students about the creative processes, the thinking and the decision making that went into the making of the movie. Rather than confine myself by subject, I simply let the discussion  ‘flow’ into the direction of the students’ curiosity, helping them understand how movies work.

It ended up being an interesting session as we discovered newer nuances of the movie as they came up in the course of the discussion. I think we all ended up learning a bit more than we bargained for.

Remembered Eisenstein at the end who used to say ‘I can’t teach but you can learn’.