With the present job losses, migrant labour crises, multiple and sheer statistics of death all around us, I have been unable to continue with my personal Bengal Troika Retrospective at home. I tried watching a couple of movies every weekend by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak, but with the sword of damocles hanging too close to our heads, the reality of the films got too real and I had to refrain.
I learned from Twitter that its seven years today since the passing of Rituparno Ghosh. M had told me after Irrfan's passing that Rituparno was also an artist who left much before his time. Having never seen any of their films, I thought what better a day to initiate myself into their body of work and watched Dosar (2006).
The film cements my belief in my understanding that some Bengali films lend themselves beautifully to literary viewings. Despite a great deal of justifiable hysteria around the survival of print in the online era, with abundant forms of new media, and a harsh, cold attention economy, the words of Umberto Eco seem to boldly withstand: The book will never die.
As an ardent devotee of the book, however, I have found myself equally devoted to another art form: Film. To me, some films seem to cross that invisible line that limits the reach of the written word and draw out more meaning than the obvious, almost as if in cooperation with literature.
It is also pertinent to note that these films are suspended solitarily, and exist alone at a safe distance from literature. Some Bengali movies, think Antareen (1993) and Antaheen (2009) so far in my observation, much like the films of Asghar Farhadi, Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, lend themselves enigmatically to literary viewings from the lens of readers. Even Richard Linklater's much revered Before Trilogy and Waking Life (2001).
There is a reversal in these films, from the screen to text. I do not know if this is already read or studied somewhere, but there are some common threads piercing through these films that lend them to be seen and experienced in the form of literature. The details in writing, not just the characters and story arcs, but also the visual imagery, the sheer enormity of what is left unsaid, the spaces of quiet that exist between frames, the routine-ness of what's unfolding onscreen, never taking the reader/viewer for granted, challenging set norms, much like the best of all art forms, these films seem to stir something.
Best enjoyed alone, I think with the current hesitation towards watching films in cinema halls, these movies are a beauty to be devoured alone, in one's bedroom with a notebook and pen. Scribbling notes on the side, like all those celebrated novels, these movies lend themselves to readings. You can read War and Peace as a part of a virtual book club, but the very act of reading the novel has to be performed alone. Similarly, these movies can be discussed, debated, written about, but the best way to experience them is to be alone and allow them to bathe all your senses.
It is because of these films that the filmmaker assumes an authorial presence in cinema, the literality of images, and the sensuality and emotionality of film’s structural elements, all of them adding value to something greater than the sum total of what's shown onscreen.
It is perhaps because these films like the best of literature observe the foolish, the mundane, the macabre, the sublime, the melancholy, and dare to play with them all while ensuring that there's an embedded message/observation. Bringing to life the quintessential requisites of a novel using the moving image and sound.
