Teaching Cinema with Gurudutt

 Amongst other things, I teach Film Direction, in my hometown.

The place where I teach had sprouted up at some point in the 2000s, when most of the mushrooming of private education seems to have happened in Western Uttar Pradesh (though I can't be too sure of this). Which means that while this is not a coaching class kind of scenario, it is not quite the Film and Television Institute of India, my alma mater.

One of the problems I have had in the past is that the students just don't have much exposure to cinema of any kind. Up to now I used to let them choose a few movies that they thought were 'good' or 'interesting' and then analyse them and discuss them with the students to help them grow some knowledge of cinema. The method did work as the students did come to appreciate a bit of cinema.
This year I thought I needed to stop this and just go straight into classical cinema, begining with Satyajit Ray.

As it happened I got a bright bunch of students this year, so they grasped  the classical bits of cinema very well. And I got bold enough to try another experiment- I started teaching them using Gurudutt.
I showed 'Pyaasa' and 'Sahab, Bibi aur Ghulam'. We went over the structure, pointed out details from VK Murthy's incredible camerawork, analysed Gurudutt's shot taking and editing choices. Then I turned to teaching them about misc-en-scene and art direction pointing out the details from Gurudutt's work. Oh, it was all very clear, clearly Gurudutt's magic had implanted images in their mind and that helped them understand aspects of cinema.

I realised that my students here belong to the Hindi speaking areas, so their appreciation of the nuances of a movie is that much greater with a Hindi movie. That really helped with Gurudutt.In addition to this, all the students had a knowledge of Gurudutt prior to coming to study filmmaking, they were already 'fans' of the movie- Gurudutt is a part of Hindi cinema's folklore. So I was able to build on a body of knowledge that they already had, which has given them enormous confidence in themselves and their knowledge of cinema.

Now we move to Satyajit Ray, but I want to show them more Hindi cinema first- I want them to get more confident with their own movies. I believe that this way the students can place themselves much better within the traditions of their own cinema.

I think my students agree with this, so we're onto something. Afterall most of these people want to work with what we from FTII have always termed 'mainstream cinema'. So its best that we learn to appreciate the traditions of this cinema. And those traditions have a lot to do with Gurudutt.

Screening Akira Kurosawa 's Rashomon

I had first seen 'Rashomon' as a student in Delhi in the 1970s. It was the year Akira Kurosawa and Michelangelo Antonioni had come visiting the Indian Film Festival in Delhi and all of Kurosawa's films were being screened at the festival venues across the city. The tickets were expensive, or so they seemed to me as a student, I bought the cheapest ones, and saw the film in widescreen straining my neck on the first row of a cinema hall.
I had heard of 'Rashomon' before I saw it: my father had seen it in Meerut. I can't remember now how it had reached Meerut in the 1950's but it had and my father had seen and loved the movie. So I was aware of the cult of Rashomon and Kurosawa by the time I grew up and actually saw the film.
Like most people who have had the chance to see 'Rashomon', my mind blew up when I saw the movie. It's a film that opens your mind about what is possible in cinema,inspires you as a filmmaker.
Years later, Rashomon continued to intrude upon my life.
In Nairobi, in the year 2009, my son was in University and brought home a book of Japanese short stories. Can't remember the name of the author but the book did state that Rashomon was actually a combination of two short stories from this collection. The story of the three men stuck in the rain is one story and the court case was a second story. Kurosawa had combined them in his masterly screenplay.
Now, here I was showing Rashomon to my students, only to find that my copy had no subtitles in English.
So here were my students, reasonably intelligent young people, hence reasonably ill informed about cinema, stuck with a film made in 1952, in black and white, in Japanese; on a summer afternoon in a hot room with a non functioning AC. I was holding my breath, would the magic of Akira Kurosawa hold?
In retrospect I need not have worried, Kurosawa's magic had my students in awe. They had their eyes popping out by the time the screening finished. They admitted they had never seen anything like it or indeed even imagined that such work existed. I thought of the Europeans who had been overawed by Kurosawa at the Venice Film Festival in 1952. Overnight Akira Kurosawa had become one of the emperors of cinema.
And here in a small Indian town, Kurosawa had done it again.
Honestly, I can't stop applauding the film...
PS: Rashomon is available for streaming on Youtube, in a version with English subtitles.

The Fan Encounter

I have a friend who runs a music and movie selling business. He's a movie buff and has tons of rare stuff. Not too many people know about his business or so I thought.
I happened to be at his shop the other day and a man on a cycle stopped by. He was dressed in attire that is typical of a 'kabadi' (typical Indian concept, difficult to explain to non-Indians, but let's say someone who buys old newspapers and beer bottles off you to sell to others). Typically, lower end 'kabadis' from the Muslim community will be seen in a 'tehmad'(a North Indian Muslim version of the South Indian lungi, except this is in checked patterns) and white kurta. He had a slight beard, I thought he had shaved and was growing back his beard hair. Other than this, nothing very remarkable, a slim wiry kind of build, typical of men who work with their hands and bodies.
He entered and asked my friend if he had 'Aan Milo Sajna', an obscure early seventies movie with Asha Parekh and Shashi Kapoor. My friend said yes he did. They discussed the technical modalities- would he take it on a DVD or a chip, all the while the man kept missing the days of his old VHS tapes.
As my work was still going on, my friend went to his VCD collection, it's arranged alphabetically so the movie starting with 'A' turned up fairly soon. It was in a 2 VCD set, clearly produced a while back- eighties, when VCD were the devices to have.
My friend showed it to me first, afterall I am a filmmaker, so by education and profession possessing a greater love and knowledge of cinema. I held the VCD set for a moment, noticed the man looking at me, so I passed it onto him to have a look.
The man's eyes lit up, yes indeed it was the movie. I don't really know what he remembered- a first date, a forgotten love, or simply love for the stars of the movie that symbolised his youth perhaps.
Now the man got a little frantic about when he could collect the movie, my friend and he started to have a skirmish where my friend said he was busy and the man said he couldn't come back, he lived in another part of the town.
I began to think about fans and their relationship with movies. How that's a part of cinema we never learnt about and yet it was the basic reality of cinema.
How this man had gone to the trouble of finding this rare shop to find a movie that he needed and wanted.
My friend peeped up to say my job was done, I collected my DVD and moved out of the shop.