Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

A deserving moment

AT THE HELM Mrinal Sen directing Anjan Dutta in “Chalchitra”.

I am very liberal at making promises, but keep very few. I will speak to you a little later. I have just got up from my sleep.” That is Mrinal Sen, one sultry afternoon in Kolkata. Getting ready to come down to Delhi for the Osian Film Festival where he is to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award this Friday, Sen is a picture of patience and candour as he takes time out to answer a few questions. Refusing to speak about his upcoming project, he fields everything else.

So, how does he feel to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at this juncture of his career?

“You say, at this juncture! At any point in time, with quiet dignity do I look upon any award conferred on me – small or big, deserving or undeserving, and, above all, upon the Lifetime Achievement Award. But, at the same time, for any such awards, initially I feel a bit uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for quite a personal reason that every time I watch my own films, I wish the same were treated as dress-rehearsals so that over again I can go about it all. Which means, correcting my own conclusions. Which, I confess, I can’t afford.”

He is credited as a founder of new cinema. What are the changes Mrinal da has observed that have been a cause of concern?

“Changes, you say! Cinema is a continuously growing medium,” he reacts. When, in 1895, cinema was born, Lumiere Brothers, the inventors of moving pictures, called their inventions nothing more than just scientific curiosity. “Soon after they realised that what they had said was wrong. Since then, till now, cinema, by its very nature, has been changing and growing.” Growing for the better, growing for the worse, he feels. “And that is the history of cinema with ups and downs.” Talking about him, he adds, “I had suffered setbacks, I had collapsed. Collapsing and apprehending that the one I had just finished was my funeral film.” Jolts notwithstanding, the veteran says he was looking for a glimmer of hope, “somewhere, everywhere, all around.”

“And surprisingly, I smelt certain freshness in the air. Wind started shifting. My colleagues and I felt an irresistible urge for a change. No compromise, for sure, but a change.” Personally, he thought “it was good enough time for me to launch a breakthrough.” And that was how “Bhuvan Shome” came up.

However, in the post-“Bhuvan-Shome” period changes continued unabated all around. “Good-bad-indifferent varieties were being made, as always. And that was an inseparable part of reality…. There is no other way,” he feels.

Mrinal da is said to be a filmmaker by accident and an author by compulsion, having coming up with his memoirs a few years back. He admits, “I had initially no interest in cinema. When in my home town, now in Bangladesh, touring cinema from Calcutta used to visit once a year, accompanied by my parents I used to watch a few silent movies and talkies. I still remember three – ‘Debdas’, ‘Kapalkundala’ and Chaplin’s ‘Kid’. Then, I had never heard of that great man about whom I made a special study much later and wrote a book and a large number of essays.”

Even when he came to Kolkata, as a student, he was not a film addict. “I was not even a regular film-goer. I had various other things to get involved in. One such involvement was reading all that I could catch hold of – history, philosophy, religion, literature, plays, poetry, art, etc. All in the Imperial Library, now after Independence, National Library,” recalls the octogenarian. And one day, “by accident”, he bumped into a book on cinema and its aesthetics – titled Film (later called Art of the Film) by one Rudolf Arnheim, “a gem of a written text”.

Sen states, “That was the beginning. Within months I finished the entire stock of books on cinema available in the library. It followed my exposure to cinema in many ways. But when I made my first film it was a disaster.” Though the maiden effort made him go into hibernation for sometime, (he started writing for periodicals then), one is glad that he wrested courage to return to filmmaking. Or else, cinema would have lost a genius.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail