A Night of Knowing Nothing [2021]

 Payal Kapadia’s stunning hybrid docu essay A Night of Knowing Nothing – alternately hypnotic and urgent, intimate and shared, impressionistic and pulsating, melancholic and feverish, fragile and radical – fluidly glided between epistolary narrative, found footage and defiant activism. The ‘Film and Television Institute of India’ graduate made her institute both canvas and springboard for her inquiries into individual and collective memories, and invoked Milan Kundera’s powerful statement in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. The delicately muted yet boldly shapeshifting work, unsurprisingly, bore eclectic cinematic traces – from being informed by Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker and John Abraham to directly nodding to Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Pasolini and Ghatak. Set to the heartbreaking voiceover of an unnamed film student – lamenting, over letters to her estranged boyfriend, the breakdown of their relationship as she belongs to a lower caste, and thereby touching upon how love is as much political as it’s personal in an intensely patriarchal and caste-ridden society like India – it expanded into a rousing testament to dissent, disobedience and resistance by students. Starting with the massive protests that’d rocked FTII upon the outrageous appointment of a loyalist of the country’s reactionary government – which Kapadia had herself fearlessly participated in – it then segued into student activism movements that erupted across various public universities, and the violent wrath of the state machinery that they faced. The film’s contrapuntal texture – interlacing elegiac meditations and dream-like images with the thrilling here-and-now verité of archival footage – was magnificently woven through its amorphous structure, exquisite photographic compositions – grainy, low-fi, 8mm and 16mm B/W images, interspersed with shots of saturated colours – and deeply absorbing sound design.

Director: Payal Kapadia

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Hindi/Bengali

Country: India

Kalyug [1981]

 Kalyug, Shyam Benegal’s modern-day retelling of Mahabharat, mirrored the giant epic’s violent tale of familial feud, hubris, compromised ethics and mutually assured destruction. Co-written with Satyadev Dubey and Girish Karnad, it transplanted the epic from medieval world of warring royalties to hostile corporate behemoths – two branches of the same family – in 1980s Bombay, who, in their unbridled power lust and desirous of a prized government contract, roll out increasingly ruinous machinations. One half of the battling families – the Pandavas – is represented by the soft-spoken eldest brother (Raj Babbar), the hedonistic middle-brother (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), the arrogant but capable youngest brother Bharatraj (Anant Nag), and the eldest’s bewitchingly beautiful wife Supriya (Rekha) who secretly covets the youngest. The other half – the Kauravas – is represented by the vindictive Dhanraj (Victor Banerjee), and his great friend and mastermind Karan (Shashi Kapoor), who’s a cultured loner, carries a secret torch for Supriya, and – unbeknownst to himself – is the former trio’s eldest brother. One pitfall of having a massive ensemble cast – which also comprised of Sushma Seth as family matriarch, Amrish Puri as her brother, A.K. Hangal as ageing loyalist, Om Puri as trade union leader, Supriya Pathak as Bharatraj’s young wife – is that they must shine in their limited screentime. The heavy plot painted a bleak picture of greed, cut-throat competition and murky realpolitik, while providing limited scope to delve deeper. The film, therefore, was a mix of some captivating highs – Karan’s reaction upon hearing his backstory and Supriya’s motherly consolation of a broken Bharatraj that veered towards erotic were haunting moments, Om Puri’s cameo was explosive, and the bloody tale was unapologetically maximalist – and unavoidable lows due to plot contrivances and overcooked moments.

Director: Shyam Benegal

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Crime Drama

Language: 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

The Story of Film: An Odyssey [2011]

 At just over a century, cinema is, by some distance, the youngest of all major artforms; yet, it has evolved, expanded and shape-shifted so extraordinarily in its relatively brief history, that any attempts at chronicling its history is bound to be an exercise in audacity. Furthermore, when one realizes that it freely built upon multiple other artforms, and its progression has been as technical as cultural and political, one can also sense the sheer complexity of that endeavour. If one dizzying way to do that was Godard’s dense, metatextual and monumental video essay Histoire(s) du Cinéma, another diametrically opposite approach was Marc Cousin’s in The Story of Film. Running at 900 minutes, and covering around 1000 films across all 6 continents, this was no less ambitious. Further, by consciously spending considerable time on silent cinema, covering films from the “global south”, and complementing technical evaluations and historical details with highly personal views – even if they were dubious or superficial at times – Cousins made this much more idiosyncratic than what a more straightforward documentary would’ve been. Spread over 15 chapters, it covered an immensely wide spectrum – films made within and outside the studio system, films that’re canonical and those beyond the canon, popular and arthouse movies, films demonstrating technological developments as well as political contexts – which also made it episodic and engaging, even if this sacrifice of depth for breadth made it too cursory and thereby less rigorous. Notwithstanding Cousins’ exasperating diction and repetitiveness, one must admire his love for the medium, the stunning span of his focus, and the herculean efforts that he invested by interviewing diverse people and physically visiting numerous places during the course of its making.

Director: Mark Cousins

Genre: Documentary/History/Mini-Series

Language: English

Country: UK

Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) [1986]

 John Abraham didn’t just embody his trailblazing mentor Ritwik Ghatak – his cinematic dare, blazing left-wing politics, defiant anti-establishmentarianism, self-destructive alcoholism and tragically curtailed life – but perhaps even took these a step further. His iconoclastic final feature Amma Ariyan – he died a year later upon a terrible accident – vividly manifested his fierce radicalism in every aspect. Made under ‘Odessa Collective’ that he’d formed with dreams of making filmmaking a political act that’s untethered from consumerist restrictions, he financed it through street contributions, made it through a participative process, and screened it in traveling shows. If his production and distribution decisions were stunning acts of rebellion, his formal choices were even bolder. It was, on surface, a road movie as Purushan (Joy Mathew), upon stumbling upon a dead young guy in Waynad who’s committed suicide, first decides to determine his identity and thereafter inform the latter’s mother who resides in Cochin. This journey mirrored the collaborative filmmaking process as what starts off with only Purushan, kept expanding and ultimately transitioned into a people’s movement by the time the targeted destination arrives. The revelation of the dead guy’s shifting backstory – amateur table player, jazz drummer, diffident political activist and Naxalite revolutionary, depending on who you’re asking – was alternated with recounting of and medications on historical acts of police brutality, class struggle and popular resistance that Purushan encounters along their route and which he chronicles in letters to his mother. The film, consequently, was heavily experimental and self-reflexive on one hand, and powerfully suffused with documentary references and political commentaries on the other, thus ensuring that this complex, quietly personal and searingly political work operated well outside both narrative conventions and easy interpretations.

Director: John Abraham

Genre: Political Drama/Road Movie/Experimental Film

Language: Malayalam

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

Pratidwandi (The Adversary) [1970]

 Satyajit Ray had touched upon political themes on multiple occasions – from capital, corruption, crooked godmen and religious dogmatism to class, feudalism, despotism and war, along with stirring feminist expressions – without necessarily being a political filmmaker. With Pratidwandi – the bravura opening salvo in his fabulous ‘Calcutta Trilogy’ (it was followed by Seemabaddha and Jana Aranya) – he blazingly became one. Ray made the metropolis a complex and dazzling canvas, battle-ground and adversary in this edgy trilogy; the political, social and economic turbulence that’d rocked the city during the late-1960s and 70s, with egalitarian and progressive ideals in collision with employment and material aspirations, informed all three films, and in particular this electrifying tour de force that remains Ray’s most radical expression and amongst his greatest masterworks. Adapted from Sunil Ganguly’s similarly blistering novel, it begins with jolting immediacy as we see Siddhartha (in a powerhouse debut performance by Dhritiman Chatterjee) – shot in photo-negative – confronting his father’s funeral pyre. He’s forced to quit medical studies, and – sandwiched between an unforgettable interview near the beginning and a violent outburst of his pent-up fury towards the end – struggles to land a job. Meanwhile, his male ego is hurt as his sister (Krishna Bose) is the family’s sole breadwinner; his younger brother, displaying decisiveness that he lacks, has joined the Naxalite cause; his friendship with a cynical friend (Kalyan Chatterjee) is counterpointed with his growing intimacy with the lovely Keya (Jayashree Roy); and he’s faced with profound dilemma between political participation vis-à-vis staying on the sidelines as a troubled observer. The film’s thrilling here-and-now atmosphere was amplified by its striking B/W images, jerky handheld cams, smouldering angst, and provocative use of conflicts, memories and dreams.

p.s. This is a revisit.

Director: Satyajit Ray

Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Political Drama

Language: Bengali

Country: India

A Man of Integrity [2017]

 Dissident Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s slow-burn thriller A Man of Integrity – which he secretly made in defiance of the suspended prison sentence and ban on filmmaking that’d been imposed by the state – is a bristling Kafkaesque work that delivered a lashing critique of the corruption, authoritarianism and bureaucracy in the broader society. It did that by pitting a wronged working-class man against a powerful, crooked and intransigent system, thereby making it feel like a companion piece to Zvyagintsev’s terrific movie Leviathan, especially in their fatalist and desolate outlooks accompanied by scorching political undercurrents. The man referred to by its title is Reza (Reza Akhlaghirad), a hot-headed, stubborn and principled man – a prickly combination even on a good day, but more so if you’re financially struggling, without any influential connections and residing in a place where due processes are thoroughly subverted – who displays the temerity to stand for his rights. He runs a small fish farm that he refuses to sell off, owes debts that he decides to address by the book, and gets into a fight with the brutish enforcer of the company that has its sights on his land upon realizing that his water is being deliberately poisoned. That’s just the beginning of his problems as he and his wife – Hadis (Soudabeh Beizaee), the school headmistress and an eloquent woman who stands by her husband while also being thoroughly infuriated by his pig-headedness – find their lives spectacularly falling apart. That’s when he decides to strike back and exact revenge for the injustices, which is inevitably at a heavy price. The tense and moody atmosphere made this grim parable, bursting with fury and dissent, a charged and gripping work.

Director: Mohammad Rasoulof

Genre: Drama/Thriller

Language: Persian

Country: Iran