F for Fake [1973]

 Orson Welles’ delightfully irreverent, discursive and playful film F for Fake – through its impish and exuberant celebration of fakery, chicanery and double bluffs – was one final act of wily chutzpah by the man who loved subverting boundaries. Conjoined with Abbas Kiarostami’s late-career masterpiece Certified Copy in their shared admiration for fakes and teasing questions on authenticity, while ironically being ravishingly original works themselves, it operated in the intersection of documentary, essay and hybrid – as it often blurred the lines separating non-fiction from fiction. It primarily focused on two fascinating charlatans who drew Welles to this film in the first place (François Reichenbach had initially planned to direct it, but happily became its producer instead). On one hand there was Elmyr de Hory, a master art forger who fooled renowned art galleries with his fakes thanks to his insouciance and brilliance; now retired, he’s settled at Ibiza where he regales his guests with wry anecdotes. Joining him was Clifford Irving, de Hory’s biographer, who then insolently walked in his subject’s footsteps by writing a fake “authorized autobiography” of Howard Hughes. Along with his infectious portraits on the two men – who he treated with undisguised fondness as fellow journeymen – Welles freely deployed the canvas for musings on how art, like magic, is an amalgamation of truth, lies, illusions and sleight of hand, and then proceeded to self-deprecatory reflections on his own journey as an artist – using false identities and fake stories, and even fictionalizing Howard Hughes in Citizen Kane – and, in arguably its most irresistible sections, amusing meditations and “stories” on Picasso. Captivatingly shot in grainy colours, it extensively featured his muse Oja Kodar in a series of sultry, shape-shifting personas.

Director: Orson Welles

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Social Satire

Language: English

Country: France

Welfare [1975]

 Frederick Wiseman weaved an extraordinarily multi-hued and multi-layered tapestry – a vivid, chaotic, complex, kaleidoscopic and microcosmic portraiture of diverse peoples connected by their desperation and struggles – in his monumental and quietly devastating documentary essay Welfare. With an expansive run-time of 167 minutes – which Wiseman pieced together from over 100 hours’ footage shot over a three-week period – this sprawling work captured the workings within the massive welfare office in NYC that made me feel stationed amidst the crowd within this bustling set-up. On surface, it served as an intricate examination into this institution, as helpless and anguished claimants hope to have their meagre requests – in nearly all cases the last resort before losing their shelters, going without food, being deprived of the last vestige of dignity and even considering to end it all – approved by the workforce governed by doubts, rules, policies and indifference, with just the hint of empathy on occasions. What emerged from the evocative vignettes – interactions both polite and furious – was a sobering and painful report on personal and collective despair, ranging from unemployment, homelessness and destitution, to debilitating medical difficulties, domestic abuse and familial estrangements, to severe marginalization, systemic discriminations and abandonment by the state. Hence, despite never overtly intending to, Wiseman ended up presenting a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that’s simultaneously nightmarish and absurdist, and a disconsolate commentary on societal apathy. The loosely edited work allowed ample time for each interaction to unfold – involving a vagrant couple, an ex-convict, a German immigrant, vulnerable middle-aged women, an angry daughter, a former teacher forced into becoming a petty thief, a racist war veteran, an equanimous Black cop – and made this an astonishingly vital impression of 1970s New York City.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English/Spanish

Country: US

Hospital [1970]

 Hospital, Frederick Wiseman’s magnificent exercise in ‘direct cinema’ – his fourth consecutive observational investigation into public institutions, but his first with an outlook permeated with radical humanism and generosity – was an audacious, bleak and absorbing essay on a massive and overcrowded general hospital that, unlike its private counterparts, is dedicated to admitting difficult and messy cases involving the underprivileged and the marginalized. The Metropolitan Hospital, located in New York’s East Harlem neighbourhood, consequently, wasn’t just a flurry of activities where the staff must continuously deal with nerve-racking emergencies, intensely stressful scenarios and complicated conversations, it also served as a sobering peek into lives mired with violent crimes, drug addictions, social ostracizations, ethnic dispossessions and class inequalities. Filmed in grainy B/W using 16mm cameras, with an unblinking gaze, and in an equanimous tone amidst the anxiety and desolation, one witnesses a young victim of gang violence, a transwoman who’s been shunned by everyone, an overworked father struggling to ensure his infant kid’s wellbeing, a former alcoholic unable to articulate his ailments, and a daughter helplessly grappling with her mom’s mortality. Through these disparate medical cases, one notices a medic expressing his annoyance at another hospital’s negligence of due process, a sympathetic physician trying in futility to get his patient on welfare, and doctors interacting with broken and panic-stricken patients with great composure. The work was especially remarkable in how Wiseman covered, through his editing, such an extraordinarily wide and disparate ground, while never rushing through any of the segments. French filmmaker Claire Simon named this as a key influence for her marvellous recent documentary Our Body, while Wiseman delved into the subject of caregiving again 19 years later with Near Death.

Director: Frederick Wiseman

Genre: Documentary

Language: English

Country: US

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis [1970]

 Giorgio Bassini’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece The Garden of Finzi-Continis was as much a haunting Holocaust novel as a stirring ode to unrequited love, and through the titular Finzi-Continis – a wealthy, aristocratic and intellectual family who lived a life of cultured seclusion and went to their deaths without any resistance – a lamentation on the passage of a certain way of life. Vittorio De Sica’s adaptation echoed, with a touch at once tender and wistful, the book’s understated tone, melancholy, personal heartbreak, collective loss and doomed atmosphere. The narrative began in 1938, just as Mussolini’s fascist government starts enacting oppressive and restrictive laws against Jewish-Italian citizens, and ended in 1943 when the Jews started getting rounded up and herded to death camps. That fateful stretch was evoked through the Finzi-Continis family – with their huge mansion, refined manners, sprawling gardens, and cloistered existence within large walls – and especially the enigmatic Micòl (Dominique Sanda). They’re portrayed through the eyes of Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio), a studious middle-class guy, who’s hopelessly in love with the strikingly beautiful Micòl and enamoured with the family. When Jews are banned from the local tennis club, the family’s private tennis court is opened to them – though the ones who join include non-Jews too, like the left-wing Malnate (Fabio Testi) – and when the public library becomes off-limit, Giorgio finds refuge in the family’s huge personal library. Things, unfortunately, go further downhill rapidly, as he finds Micòl becoming ever more aloof and beyond reach, and the Jewish community in Ferrara being pushed towards annihilation. Beautifully photographed in soft-focus and washed-out colours, the film – initially supposed to be directed by Valerio Zurlini – became a late-career revival for the once pioneer of Italian neorealism.

Director: Vittorio De Sica

Genre: Drama/War Drama/Romantic Drama/Holocaust Movie

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Ogro (Operación Ogro) [1979]

 Gillo Pontecovro – former chemistry student, anti-fascist partisan during WW2 and Marxist journalist after the war who was catalysed into filmmaking upon seeing Rossellini’s seminal neorealist work Paisan – is perennially associated with his blazing masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, that remains both landmark political cinema and formally daring exercise. Operación Ogro – his largely overlooked final feature – might’ve lacked in pulsating ferocity, but was no less a cinema of resistance that straddled between rigorous documentation of the eponymous operation and ideological discourse on revolutionary actions, and a compelling political thriller too. Shot in washed-out colours, it’s structured along two interweaving strands, thus covering the divergent routes taken by two comrades-in-arms due to deep dialectical divergences despite their shared love for Basque identity and detestation of Franco; this aspect – and how the death of the one whose choices were underpinned by a more violent method represented the end of a chapter – heavily reminded me of Ken Loach’s powerful IRA film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The primary track, set in 1973, chronicles in riveting details the mission undertaken by four men and two women belonging to the far-left separatist group ETA – the methodical cell leader Izarra (Gian Maria Volontè), the hot-headed former priest Txabi (Eusebio Poncela), Txabi’s wife (Ángela Molina) and the rest – who relocate to Madrid with the plans of kidnapping Franco’s Deputy PM Carrero Blanco (aka ‘ochre’), but changes that to assassination when he becomes the PM. In the melancholic parallel tract, set few years after Franco’s death, ETA has come to the negotiating table led by Izarra, while Txabi continues to be a radical separatist. The music was scored by Morricone while Ana Torrent featured in a cameo.

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Docufiction/Historical Thriller

Language: Spanish/Basque

Country: Italy/Spain

Todo Modo [1976]

 Elio Petri’s agitational and subversive cinema – and in turn Italian political cinema from its “years of lead” period, of which he was a leading force – reached a fever pitch with Todo Modo. This was a blistering and ferocious assault on the then political establishment – especially the Christian Democratic Party –, the Vatican’s ability to ensure their religious stranglehold through crafty manoeuvrings, and wealthy oligopolistic industrialists. In Petri’s hands – who could blend bravura experimental style with fearless left-wing lens – it was also a chilling examination of power, opportunism, hypocrisy, corruption and fascist tendencies, and the parasitic and chameleonic natures of the aforementioned troika. Adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s novel of the same name, the feral satire is nearly completely set inside a stunningly conceived and designed Brutalist bunker – the cold, modernist and claustrophobic set design by Dante Ferretti gave the film an expressionistic and even sci-fi look, while enhancing its macabre tone – where the country’s most influential men have assembled for a few days, while a mysterious epidemic rages outside. They’re ostensibly there for a monastic retreat and spiritual cleansing; however, soon enough it’s clear that cunning machinations to further entrench their positions are what’s uppermost in their minds. Two men take centre-stage in this arrestingly orchestrated chaos – “il Presidente” (Gian Maria Volonté), a clear stand-in for Aldo Moro, whose religious fervour and sexual repressions are matched by his hunger for further consolidating his political position; and a creepy, hell-raising priest (Marcello Mastroianni) with skeletons in his closet – and this hilariously grotesque and anarchic setup attained surreal proportions as the men start facing violent deaths. Ennio Morricone composed the film’s score while the exceptional cast featured Michel Piccoli in a cameo.

Director: Elio Petri

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Satire/Ensemble Film

Language: Italy

Country: Italy

Property Is No Longer a Theft [1973]

 The title for Elio Petri’s blistering comedy Property Is No Longer A Theft can be taken both at face value and with a heavy dose of irony; that, and the droll ingenuity of its phrasing, readily recall the two preceding films in his ‘Trilogy of Neurosis’, viz. the blazing masterpiece Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and the abrasive agitprop The Working Class Goes to Heaven. Though considerably underrated, it remains an unequivocally brilliant work thanks to the interplay of aesthetic ferocity and intellectual dare that the iconoclastic filmmaker brought in while blending radical politics and ferocious polemics with deliciously gonzo, sleazy, provocative B-movie aesthetics and even Brechtian splashes. The narrative is built around a farcical war of attrition between Total (Flavio Bucci), a young bank cashier who’s literally allergic to money and calls himself “Mandrakian Marxist”, and a wealthy, corrupt and glibly offensive businessman called “The Butcher” (Ugo Tognazzi). Upon witnessing the bank manager’s sycophancy towards the latter, Total quits his job, begins stalking Butcher – the very embodiment of the evils of capitalism for him – and starts stealing his belongings – inane things at first, before progressing to expensive objects and even his mistress (Daria Nicolodi). The Butcher, meanwhile, avoids reporting Total to the maniacal investigating cop (Orazio Orlando), as he’s massively over-reported his loss to the insurance. This anarchic film’s script was as unhinged as its characters, which also comprised of a vaudeville master thief (Mario Scaccia) and Total’s bemused father (Salvo Randone), and is bookended by three riotous sequences – a chaotic bank robbery where the clerks unleash vicious dogs upon the robbers; a salesman’s hilarious demo of anti-theft devices; and an amusing paean to thieves and robbers.

Director: Elio Petri

Genre: Crime Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

Slap the Monster on Page One [1972]

 Marco Bellocchio’s tour de force media satire Slap the Monster on Page One was a confluence of thrilling genre cinema and radical political filmmaking, with the pulpy title splendidly mirroring the film’s biting tone, incendiary theme and hardboiled form. Written by Sergio Donati who’s best-known for his collaborations with Sergio Leone, the film continued – with cutting fury – Bellocchio’s blazing and subversive streak from Fists in the Pocket and China Is Near, albeit with the polemic turned up a notch along the lines of Rosi, Pontecorvo and Petri. It began on a throbbing note as documentary footage – including a reactionary speech being delivered by Ignazio La Russa, a right-wing politician who’s presently Italy’s President of the Senate, to vilify surging left-wing rallies and anti-government demonstrations – segued into the narrative as a group of young rebels is seen pelting stones into the office of Il Giornale, a newspaper that peddles fascist agenda to its conservative readers. Its powerful and sleazy editor-in-chief Bizanti (Gian Maria Volonté) injects news items with nefarious slants and insinuations with aims of “indirect propaganda” aligned to the business interests of his odious boss (John Steiner); the sequence where he coaches a young reporter, while “fixing” his write-up, was both disturbingly prescient and savagely funny. When a beautiful college student belonging to a bourgeoise family is found raped and murdered, Bizanti laps up this “golden opportunity” to concoct a false narrative – and clinically frame a left-wing activist for the violent crime – to further the political machinations of his power-seeking boss ahead of upcoming elections. Volonté was frighteningly brilliant as the kind of rotten, self-serving and manipulative dealer in disinformation and fake news that’s infested today’s reactionary mainstream journalism.

Director: Marco Bellocchio

Genre: Black Comedy/Political Thriller/Political Satire/Social Satire/Media Satire

Language: Italian

Country: Italy

La Rupture (The Breach) [1970]

 Claude Chabrol’s stunning ‘Hélène cycle’ – La Femme Infidèle, Que la Bête Meure, Le Boucher, La Rupture and Juste Avant la Nuit – delivered barbed interrogations into the bourgeoisie through chilling crime thrillers, with all featuring the luminous Stéphane Audran as the eponymous heroine. The series’ penultimate film was among the darkest and definitely the most bonkers of the lot, operating simultaneously as fiendish psychological thriller, exploration into the rotten core of social entitlement, and black comedy veering towards absurdism and even surrealism. Its violent opening – Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot), the drug-addled and mentally disturbed husband of Hélène (Audran), injuring their kid son Michel in a moment of frenzy, which makes her retaliate by beating Charles with a frying pan – set the tone for what followed. She leaves home with Michel, admits him in a hospital, takes refuge at a nearby boarding house, and files for divorce. Her affluent father-in-law Ludovic (Michel Bouquet), insidiously drunk in his power and privilege, had always despised her for her “disreputable” past as former strip dancer; and now, intent on seizing custody of his prized “male heir”, he employs the sleazy Paul (Jean-Pierre Cassel) to tarnish her image. With no ploy – howsoever vile or grotesque – beneath him, he goes about doing just that with the help of his deliriously raunchy girlfriend (Catherine Rouvel). Audran was sublime as the unflappably moral and quietly defiant woman who refuses to bow down; Bouquet, Cassel and Rouvel were captivating in their varying shades of villainy; and the vividly bright photography accentuated the nasty undercurrents, in this nightmarish adaptation of Charlotte Armstrong’s novel, who he’d adapt again 3 decades later for the terrific Merci pour le Chocolat.

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Psychological Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Nada [1974]

 Nada, the ferocious, fatalist and brilliant political thriller by Jean-Patrick Manchette, was a book tailor-made for adaptation by Costa-Gavras; the case for that appears especially stronger when one realizes that the Greek-French director made the magnificent State of Siege – which too featured the abduction and assassination of an American official by a left-wing guerrilla outfit, albeit in Uruguay instead of France – a year prior to the book’s publication. Though Chabrol was also a political filmmaker with strong leftist affiliations and made multiple subversive thrillers over his fecund career, his political expressions were often aimed at the bourgeoisie rather than the state, while his thrillers were distinctive for their sultry inaction and comeuppances that may never arrive. He was, therefore, an uncharacteristic person to adapt a violent and explosive book like this. However, he possibly sensed the cool, the cynicism and the dark irony underlying the tale of a ragtag group of anarchists kidnapping the US ambassador in France, even while the reader/viewer knows from get-go that this is a spectacularly suicidal mission. It ends in an ugly massacre as the vicious and reactionary cop tasked with hunting them down, and the ham-fisted governmental machinery backing him, don’t want it to end in any other way. The ensuing work, consequently, possessed the filmmaker’s sardonic and seditious jabs – and an arresting showdown that mirrored the book’s deep nihilism – while also appearing rough and uneven on various occasions. The eponymous Nada groupuscule comprised of a Catalonian partisan (Fabio Testi), a weary middle-aged revolutionary-for-hire (Maurice Garrel) and a dipsomaniac (Lou Castel) among others, while the carnage against them is spearheaded by a ruthless cop (Michel Aumont) and a Machiavellian Interior Minister (André Falcon).

Director: Claude Chabrol

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller

Language: French

Country: France

Camera Buff [1979]

 Camera Buff, which established Krzysztof Kieślowski as an essential voice in world cinema, powerfully evoked his rich background as a former documentary filmmaker as well as his sublime prowess in crafting profound social, political, existential and moral inquires through narratives. It also stirringly exhibited self-reflexive elements – be it his own early days as amateur cinephile or his ethical grappling with the repercussions of documenting “truth” in complex political climates that ultimately influenced his decision to switch forms – through Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), a once easy-going man, doting husband and carefree worker, who discovers a magnetic love for cinema, becomes an amateur documentarian, experiences political and existential awakenings at the cost of marital and professional stability, starts understanding both the vitality and predicaments of his images, and eventually decides to train his lens on himself. Four key moments shaped his journey – his impulsive purchase of a 16mm camera to film his new-born daughter; being commissioned by his boss (Stefan Czyzewski) to shoot their factory’s jubilee celebration and then coaxed into submitting that at a festival; confiding into his troubled wife (Malgorzata Zabkowska) that he wants deeper experiences instead of simple contentedness, thereby cementing their marital collapse; and a work of activism inadvertently leading to the expulsion of a senior colleague (Jerzy Nowak) he’s fond of. Shaped by exceptional performances spearheaded by the outstanding Stuhr, delightful use of wry humour in the script, and engrossing visual compositions, the film’s two particularly unforgettable sequences involved the airing of an immensely moving docu that he’s made on a disabled colleague and his instinctive urge to view his wife’s departure through a frame, and featured a cameo by Kieślowski’s great namesake Krzysztof Zanussi as himself.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

p.p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES). 

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Genre: Drama/Political Satire/Marriage Drama

Language: Polish

Country: Poland

Padatik (The Guerrilla Fighter) [1973]

 Padatik – the thrilling, fierce, sardonic and meditative final chapter in Mrinal Sen’s extraordinary ‘Calcutta Trilogy’, preceded by Interview and Calcutta 71 – was political cinema at its most blazing, dialectical and fearlessly radical. The electrifying work was infused with Godard’s self-reflexive style and Costa-Gavras’ pulsating aesthetics, in solidarity with the spirit of internationalism while embedded in the turbulent zeitgeist of 1970s Calcutta, powerfully advocating Marxist ideals and agitprop principles of ‘Third Cinema’ and cinema of praxis, and interweaved with dazzling formal and stylistic choices. Sen interspersed observational and conversational chamber sequences with energetic hand-held cams on the streets, documentary footage, newspaper reels, mock advertisements, striking protest photography by himself, Brechtian interludes, POV shots, jump cuts and freeze frames. The film consequently alternated in its championing of revolutionary fervour, class consciousness and political dissent; takedown of apathy, rigid obedience and shallow consumerism; and introspections on the Left confronting the state while grappling with internal conflicts. Splendidly shot by K.K. Mahajan and scored by Ananda Shankar, it follows a few days in the life of Sumit (Dhritiman Chatterjee), a militant Communist who’s been provided refuge, upon escaping from a police van, at an upscale apartment owned by a Punjabi-Bengali woman (Simi Garewal) who’s employed with an ad agency, sympathetic to revolutionary causes and engaged in feminist activism. Sumit’s inner turmoil – which turns towards disillusionment while stationed in the flat – is manifested through his long, intimate conversations with his hostess, changing camaraderie with a younger comrade, and his fraught relationship with his ageing father (Bijon Bhattacharya), a former freedom fighter and now an exploited factory labourer. Chatterjee’s terrific turn, and the film too, incidentally, made for a fascinating complement to Ray’s masterful Pratidwandi.

p.s. This is a revisit.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Drama/Political Drama

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Calcutta 71 [1972]

 In Calcutta 71, Mrinal Sen constructed a fierce and subversive examination of impoverishment, deprivation, exploitation and the seeds of revolutionary politics, with irony, eclectic influences informed by European New Wave and Third Cinema, and a powerful Marxist lens. Shaped like a multi-act piece, the second film in his magnificent ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ – bookended by Interview and Padatik – was as ferociously political and biting in its social observations as it was dazzling in its blend of formal choices, narrative devices and cinematic styles ranging from classical to experimental. Following an arresting montage, The droll prologue – in the veins of farcical political satire – finds the protagonist from the previous film (Ranjit Mallick) facing an absurdist trial for having exhibited anti-capitalist angst by defiling a mannequin, and featured a hilarious anti-proletarian war waged by the bourgeoisie. That segued into four thematically-linked episodes (adapted from stories by Manik Bandopadhyay, Probodh Sanyal, Samaresh Basu and Ajitesh Bandopadhyay) – a destitute family in the 1930s who’re forced to seek an alternative shelter from incessant rains; a family forced to meet ends through prostitution, while struggling to maintain middle-class respectability, during the 1943 famine; a group of rebellious teenagers smuggling rice by train, braving righteous cops and overbearing middle-class men; and a cocktail party filled with self-centred wealthy humbugs. The first three were made in the neorealist tradition, while the fourth was a quintessential Felliniesque parody. The film ended with a scorching agitprop epilogue where a young Naxal revolutionary, killed by the cops, holding the audience to account. The ensemble cast included Utpal Dutt as a sneering prosecutor, Haradhan Bandopadhyay as an irate judge, Madhabi Mukherjee as a troubled working woman, and Ajitesh Bandopadhyay as a pompous hypocrite.

p.s. This is a revisit.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Political Satire/Black Comedy/Omnibus Film/Experimental Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Interview [1971]

 Mrinal Sen made a fabulous entry into radical political cinema – blending plucky insouciance, subversive wit and searing angst – with Interview. It, in turn, laid the foundations for his blazing ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ – which also comprised of the scorching Calcutta 71 and the scintillating Padatik – and demonstrated his love for counterpointing Marxist discourse and dissent with formal bravura and postmodernist playfulness. The slice-of-life dusk-to-dawn premise is centred on the titular interview. A young, personable, middle-class guy (Ranjit Mallick) – eager to ascend the social ladder – has landed an opportunity for a lucrative job at a foreign corporation, thanks to his uncle. All he must do is arrive in a dapper Western suit. His plans, unfortunately, go haywire, as his only suit is in a laundry which is shut on account of a flash labour strike, and thereafter for being unable to remain insular in a crowded bus. The only option left to him, ultimately, is to arrive at the prized interview in a scandalously inappropriate attire. The film, interestingly, began with the dismantling of a statue representing colonial past and culminated with the disrobing of a mannequin embodying consumerist present, whilst the tone transitioned from wry and amusing for most parts to seething fury at the end. Around the one-third mark, the protagonist dramatically breaks the fourth wall while traveling in a tramcar, and sheepishly informs that he’s an actor being followed by a movie camera, his onscreen mother is played by Karuna Bannerjee (Pather Panchali’s Sarbojaya), and his story is real despite the artifice. This Brechtian departures, combined with satirical liveliness and ingenious use of street photographs and footage (shot by Sen himself), made it a work of impish, idiosyncratic audacity.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Mrinal Sen

Genre: Drama/Political Satire/Experimental Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Amar Lenin (My Lenin) [1970]

 While Ritwik Ghatak’s staunch political beliefs and leanings remained largely beneath the complex dramatic surfaces of his films – imbuing the themes and proceedings with additional context without making them overtly political – they were far more articulated elsewhere, be it in his writings or in his iconoclastic documentary Amar Lenin. Once a holy grail for Ghatak aficionados as it’d been rendered obscure by censorship woes and formal unavailability – it was, in fact, banned by the country’s Censor Board, which was eventually overturned by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi – and it continues to exist today in the fringes through low-quality bootleg copies, and denied public screenings on the rare occasions that anyone attempts to do that. What’s particularly ironic is that, this 20-minute work, made in order to commemorate the birth centenary of Vladimir Lenin, was anything but inflammatory or provocative; rather, made on a small budget, it was completely devoid of hyperbolics, belligerence and harangue, and its tone was gentle, restrained and quietly uplifting. “Jatra”, a traditional form of folk-theatre popular in rural Bengal that’re generally focussed on religious and mythological topics, was often used during the 1960s and 70s by Communist collectives and playwrights to raise social and political awareness; the docu begins with a footage of one such performance at a village, with Marx and Lenin in Western outfits but speaking in Bengali, and then ending with a joyous recital of L’Internationale in Bengali. A young farmer, upon seeing this, is inspired to read more about Lenin’s ideas and activism, and then takes a trip to Calcutta to witness the processions, events and speeches celebrating the centenary, and finally participates with other farmers in a land collectivisation drive.

Director: Ritwik Ghatak

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Short Film

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Thampu [1978]

 Aravindan’s gently observational, lyrical and understated docufiction Thampu delicately straddled between fact and fiction. Alongside its form and aesthetics that were shaped by verité and fly-on-the-wall filmmaking, through portraitures deeply rooted in social realities, fragmentary structure, poetic visual language, and startling instances of breaking the fourth wall, it manifested that through its making too. Aravindan travelled to a coastal hamlet in Kerala with few former circus artistes; they set up tent, called the villagers to view performances, and shot the acts juxtaposed with the audience’s enthralled reactions; the villagers eventually got involved in the preparations of an upcoming festival, which therefore led to closure of this setup that merged avant-garde filmmaking with social experiment. Its spare three-point arc – viz. a traveling circus troupe arrives from somewhere to a nondescript village; temporarily sets up shop, provides performances to paying audience during evenings, while practicing during the days; and quietly departs for some other destination – was accompanied with fleeting insights into the group’s long history, current financial challenges, and growing weariness among its older crew members, and interspersed with the aforementioned local festivities and existential crisis of a young guy belonging to an upper class family who’s at odds with his father on account of his love for arts and music instead of worldly affairs. The cast comprised of non-professionals as well as few professional actors like Bharath Gopi as the troupe’s brusque manager who wields his power over this motley group of impoverished, marginalized, disenfranchised and nomadic performers. Shot in austere B/W by veteran cinematographer Shaji N. Karun, it wasn’t surprising that Aravindan displayed such profound empathy for his subjects considering that, like them, he too existed in the margins.

Director: G. Aravindan

Genre: Drama/Social Drama/Docu-fiction/Experimental Film

Language: Malayalam

Country: India

Garm Hava (Scorching Winds) [1973]

 M.S. Sathyu’s celebrated film Garam Hava delved into the minority experience during India’s Partition, not in terms of physical violence and political intricacies, but on its social and economic costs, by steadfastly focusing on a Muslim family that served as a microcosmic representation of the community. Additionally, it provided a mirror to three disparate periods – 1948, recently independent yet divided nation, on the backdrop of Gandhi’s assassination, when the story is set; 1973, on the verge of being plunged into Emergency, when the film was made (against considerable odds); and now, a polarized time replete with ghettoization and persecutions. The slice-of-life parable – adapted from a short story by Marxist and feminist Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai, and adapted jointly by Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi, and script writer, art director and Sathyu’s wife Shama Zaidi – is centred on the Mirza family in Agra, which is headed by two contrasting brothers. While the elder brother, who’s involved in politics and is aware of his self-interests, relocates to the newly formed Pakistan, the idealistic and gentle-natured Salim (veteran thespian Balraj Sahni, in a distinguished turn, that was also his final), who runs a shoe business, and stays back with his wife, kids and aged mother. His deep optimism that things will soon improve is continuously undermined as he loses their ancestral home, sees his business spiral, and faces religious hostility, while his love-stuck daughter (Gita Siddharth) suffers debilitating heartbreaks, elder son checks out, and younger son (Farooq Shaikh) fails to get employed. Yet, despite these relentlessly tragic setbacks, Salim refuses to surrender his dignity and hope, and ultimately embraces progressive politics, with this humanist streak providing a moving mirror to these turbulent times.

Director: M.S. Sathyu

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Political Drama

Language: Urdu/Hindi

Country: India

Manthan (The Churning) [1976]

 Shyam Benegal, who’d made ad films on Amul during his advertising days, partnered with Verghese Kurien – who’d played a pivotal role in Amul’s success and “White Revolution in India” during the 1970s – and a whopping 500,000 farmers who donated Rs. 2 each, in his compelling film Manthan. It was infused with remarkable political prescience by being a crowdfunded film – and therefore, free of commercial obligations – that chronicled the cooperative dairy movement pioneered by Kurien which turned milk farmers into micro-owners and thereby considerably freed of exploitations by predatory businessmen. Benegal, however, didn’t have a hagiographic character study in mind. Instead, through Manohar Rao (Girish Karnad), a veterinary doctor who arrives in a tiny hamlet with hopes of collectivising the rural community into a cooperative, he painted a microcosmic and multitextured tapestry on impoverished villagers manipulated, fleeced and turned into bonded labour by a cunning local dairy owner (Amrish Puri), and rabid cast-based discrimination of the Dalit populace by an upper-caste Panchayat leader (Kulbhushan Kharbanda). The gruff and tenacious Rao, armed with his with socialist and egalitarian ideals, must navigate through these complex, seething and violent fault-lines in order to have the milk cooperative set-up and operationalized. The fearlessly rebellious Bhola (Naseeruddin Shah), the fiery and independent-minded Bindu (Smita Patil), Rao’s troubled wife (Abha Dhulia) and his impassive colleague (Mohan Agashe) interlaced the brewing maelstrom with riveting human dynamics. This remarkable final chapter in Benegal’s bleak and fierce ‘Rural Trilogy’ – preceded by Ankur and Nishant – comprised of an alternately angry, mournful and sensuous script by Vijay Tendulkar and Kaifi Azmi, lyrical vistas of the harsh landscape by Govind Nihalani, and a recurring song that served as a deeply evocative motif.

Director: Shyam Benegal

Genre: Drama/Rural Drama/Film a Clef

Language: Hindi

Country: India

Jana Aranya (The Middleman) [1976]

 ‘Calcutta Trilogy’, which represented a radical shift for Satyajit Ray – into terrains that were darker, themes that were furiously political, and a form that was edgier – culminated with the Dickensian parable Jana Aranya, arguably the bleakest, murkiest and most cynical of the troika. While the books that Pratidwandi and Seemabaddha had been adapted from were excellent too, the novel by Shankar was the richest and most dazzling of the lot, and the wry, ironic and episodic tale – which progressed towards a desolate climax through seriocomic vignettes – couldn’t have provided for a more apposite finale, and in turn a mirror to the troubled times, and therefore the moody subtexts that Ray had in mind. The film’s caustic opening sequence – students nonchalantly cheating in a university exam, surrounded by classroom walls laden with political graffiti calling for armed rebellion against the state – provided a deadpan introduction to Somnath (Pradep Mukherjee), who doesn’t cheat himself but passively enables the illegitimate act. Though he struggles for a conventional job before being drawn into self-employment as a middleman by an street-smart elderly acquaintance (Utpal Dutt), Somnath doesn’t possess the existential angst or political consciousness of Siddhartha in Pratidwandi; rather, he goes on to demonstrate the elastic moral compass and willingness to participate in rat race of Shyamalendu in Seemabaddha, even if his milieu is his polar opposite – viz. the city’s underbelly where everything is purchasable. This Machiavellian corruptibility is epitomised by Natabar Mittir (played with stinging brilliance by Rabi Ghosh), a “public relations expert”, who persuades Somnath into the sordid act of pimping to win a lucrative contract. Despite its many amusing moments, the film’s vision of urban desolation was simultaneously unnerving and transfixing.

p.s. This is a revisit.

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama

Language: Bengali

Country: India

Seemabaddha (Company Limited) [1971]

 Seemabaddha strikingly contrasted Pratidwandi and Jana Aranya, the two films which bracketed it in Satyajit Ray’s stunning ‘Calcutta Trilogy’. The latter films evoked angst, disillusionment and desolation through college-educated young men struggling to land white-collar jobs. This, instead, delivered a coolly sardonic glimpse into a world of privilege, entitlement, contemptuous indifference towards those not belonging to their exclusive world (from the faceless working-class to those battling to dismantle the system), and corporate rat race, where everyone is outwardly cordial while slyly pushing their selfish interests. Adapted from Shankar’s compelling novel, Shyamalendu (Barun Chanda) is affable, charming, intelligent and articulate; he’s also fervidly ambitious and casually amoral, thereby making him a captivating anti-hero, who we root for even when he’s making ethical transgressions. His choices are revealed through the uncorrupted perspectives of his beautiful sister-in-law (Sharmila Tagore), who’s come over for a few days to his posh company-paid flat. She’s held him in high esteem since long – he was once a brilliant student with scholarly bent – and is amazed by his material successes. As the fast-rising executive in a prestigious British firm, gunning for a big promotion, he’s faced with an acute hurdle when an export consignment is found defective; he – along with a self-serving labour officer (Ajoy Banerjee) – concocts a wicked ploy to turn this challenge into an opportunity, to use “corporate-speak”. In a delicious choice, Ray left it until the midway mark to introduce the central conflict, exquisitely shaping the context until then, which made this dark morality tale’s unravelling that much more biting. The climactic stairway ascension, shot in real-time, was as physically exhausting as stingingly allegorical, in this sharply enacted and incisive critique of consumerist ideals.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review can be found here.

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Urban Drama

Language: Bengali

Country: India