The Poet’s Film in Cannes

               

 

The celebration of the best in cinema is on in Cannes. It is happening from 13^th to 24 May 2015. Here there are multiple fora to showcase the cinematic  genius of our times.  Short Film Corner is one of them, where Satat (Continued), a short film by Delhi based poet-filmmaker Devi Prasad Mishra is featured. It is the  assertion of independent cinema. We find joy in talking about the film, the film maker and the hope that such films bring about for the revival of meaningful cinema. - NDFS Desk

               

 

 

    The 18 minute long film Satat (Continued) has been featured in the Cannes Film Festival in Short Film Corner. Its director is Devi Prasad Mishra, who is the renowned Hindi poet and short story writer – he lives in Delhi. 

 

Satat (Continued) The Film:

 The film that features in the Cannes Film Festival is about two Indian adivasi children. In  the backdrop of the twittering  birds,  shriek of cranes and rumbling of mining at a distance the two village children are playing ‘gulli danda’ on a dusty village road.

Pedestrians, herdsmen, cyclists and motorcyclists pass by them. It does not bother the two playing lads. They go on with their game.

One motorcyclist is even suspicious of the camera crew that is apparently shooting the playing boys. He is the mining contractor.

 In a while one of the boys is called by his mother. He rides his bicycle and cycles out to reach his mother. The other boy walks a distance to drink water.  He comes back but the other boy has yet to surface from his not so distant home- he finally materializes but hurries down and upand down to the pond to tend to his fishing net in the nearby pond. Eventually the left-alone boy follows him and brings him back. The play starts again.

 The play may have interruptions and suspensions but it cannot be terminated. The play is metaphor of life that must continue.  The film is almost without the spoken words. It is tacit, imagistic, metaphorical, and poetic. It articulates itself through innocence of human presence and metaphor of continuity. 

How Satat (Continued) happened:

 

Satat happened accidentally- Devi was in a tribal belt on the cusp of Madhya Pradesh – Orissa border doing a communitarian documentary when he saw two village boys playing gulli danda. He immediately had a sketchy narrative popping up with a blurred beginning, middle and end. He talked to children and briefed them as to what he wanted. The film was shot endlessly through the glare of the morning and mid day sun as the game went on. He told his cameraman Tarique Mohammad that the film will go to Cannes and it did.  So he found the characters and the story then and there on the kuccha road; he made the non- actor Adivasi boys Sardar and Balchand to act in an impromptu, sketchy and uncertain cultural venture. It took him and his editor Ajmal Khan days and months to carve out a visual narrative and to put together the right images at right places. 

The Devi Prasad Mishra:

Known for his moral courage, reclusive poetic habitat, and his disdain for literary machinations Devi won two documentary projects from PSBT, and got National Award  for one of them The Female Nude.    He has almost completed a documentary feature All This Because. It is about the loneliness of womanhood amid the male dominated social prejudices, male gaze and male desires. It is about a rebel woman poet Jyotsana who eventually committed suicide. He has almost completed a  feature film Mahabhinishkramana ( The Great Going Out),  in shoe string budget, wherein the non- actor Adivasis have acted.  It busts the primary education system atrociously designed for the remote rural children.

 Having been awarded Sanskriti Samman, Bharat Bhushan Smriti Samman, Sharad BilloreSamman and chosen by one among thirteen faces by Illustrated Weekly of India for his poetry Devi follows Cannes phenomenon avidly watching its official selections over the years, the French Cultural Centre being the primary source. Even though he is not in Cannes due to his pressing schedules he thinks that it certainly is an exciting hub for filmmakers.  Here the best experiments and concepts  in cinema, and spirit of iconoclasm are exhibited left, right and centre, literally .

 A  film buff involved in running a film society in his home town Allahabad he now lives in New Delhi with his artist wife Hem Jyotika, and son Udbhav who is learning sculpture at Jamiaand making some  real weird music,  a small part of it Devi has used in his film Satat.

Devi started as a poet, he wants to live it out as a film maker, he quips. 

On Independent Cinema & Contemporary Hindi Cinema:

 

He feels that the true independent cinema is like writing poetry- you don’t have money, you are not paid for your cultural production, you are always discouraged to do what you desire to do, you are doubted as deviant, you don’t have a structured audience. So even if he has three screenplays almost ready for full feature length films based on his own three short stories he is sceptic about taking them to a pragmatic end. 

He feels that the present phase of Hindi cinema has discovered the rawness of underclass dialect and vernacular. But alas, except for Vishal and to a certain degree Dibakar no cinema director has a philosophical and ideological and political mooring. The new main stream Hindi cinema has generally ceased to be that stupid but it is  violence centric, or libertarian - it is forgetful of Ritwik and Satyajit Ray. It is Hollywood way where you have enviable performances, gangsters, spectacular scenarios, smart camera work, witticism at its best but no innate narrative. It only reflects the neo liberal market spirit. The underclass is being portrayed as Lampat. “If we can take a reference from contemporary cinema then what we need to be inspired from is the cinema of Dardene Brothers(France ) or Kaurismaki Brothers(Finland) or Mike Leigh(England)or AsgharFarhadi and JafarPanahi(Iran) or Nuri BilgeCeylan(Turkey),” he avers.

Saving the Apu Trilogy

The journey of the digitally restored version of The Apu Trilogy is packed with dark stories and years of near detective work by those determined to preserve some of Satyajit Ray's finest works. After the restoration, the film is releasing on May 8, 2015 in US. 
Aseem Chhabra finds out more from Peter Becker and Lee Kline, the two men behind the restoration.


Exactly 60 years ago, May 3, 1955, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held the world premiere of Satyajit Ray's film Pather Panchali.

The story goes that Ray worked on a 24-hour schedule to get the print on the flight.
Ray did not accompany the film and the print that played at MoMA did not have subtitles.

But the film was a success among film connoisseurs.

The next year it was invited to play at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the Best Human Document award.

Two years later, the film had a theatrical release at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in Manhattan where it ran for eight months -- something unheard of these days.
To mark the 60th anniversary of Pather Panchali, MoMA will host a screening of the film May 4.

Later that week Janus Films and the Criterion Collection will release brand new 4K restored prints of The Apu Trilogy -- first at the Film Forum in New York City and later at art house theatres in many cities across the United States.
It is a rare honour and a celebration for the three masterpieces that in many ways are the best-known Indian films in the West and elsewhere.

Despite the growing interest in Bollywood in Europe, Asia and even North America, a number of remarkable Indian indie films that have played in recent years at major film festivals, no other Indian filmmaker has earned the kind of recognition that was given to Ray.

There is a reason why the Japanese master Akira Kurosawa said the following about Ray: 'Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or the moon.'

But this journey of the digitally restored version of The Apu Trilogy is packed with dark stories, including a fire in a film laboratory in London that nearly destroyed all the original negatives of the three films and it involves years of dedicated and near detective work by experts and lovers of cinema who were determined to preserve the three masterpieces.


-Aseem Chhabra in New York

 (Aseem Chhabra is a Freelance writer, programmer and professional moviegoer. He is also associated with New York Indian Film Festival and Silk Screen Asian American Film Festival.)

courtesy: www.rediff.com 
link: http://www.rediff.com/movies/special/exclusive-saving-the-apu-trilogy/20150429.htm