#Scurf121: Mrinal Sen’s lost short films
On finding a strange familiarity in these shorts, that were almost lost
Brimming with promise, poignance and candour, Mrianl Sen’s short films from 1986-87 uploaded on YouTube have their own liquid existence. Ministrations on aesthetics, social and political realities, and how people continue to evolve around love, these are a set of 12 short films originally called Kabhi Door Kabhi Paas. The shorts run for about 21-23 minutes each and read like deeply personal reveries, possibly hidden between the pages of an old, forgotten diary, discovered merely by chance. Starring revered actors from that time of the Indian film industry, Neena Gupta, Aparna Sen and the late Girish Karnad, the short films take the now deceased director's legacy forward.
Meant to be devoured with a thrilling edge, these shorts are dense with the easy, known intimacies of Sen’s feature films, making secret connections to the essence shared by seemingly unrelated things. It is through these connections that while watching them, I tried to feel my way into the pith of these various stories. Some about the mystery of love and if it evaporates over time, others about the various turns of friendships, still others about identity and the strange faces we assume as we age and then about the way we hold on to our dead. The shorts act as an estuary where people’s social clothing with which they dress their raw, unknowable selves, meets with their search for a way that will be grasped at and understood by the ones who matter.
Through the shorts Sen’s attention constellates around depicting acutely personal human emotions over his other highly political films. The ten films in the set are: Two Sisters, After a Decade, Kabhi Door Kabhi Paas, Modern Times, Swayamvar, The Victory, The Stranger, The Anniversary, and The Unvanquished.
Sen uses familiar techniques like jumpcuts, montage, blackouts, and point-of-view shots. Due to lack of preservation, the shorts have spilling audios, barking loudness, scratchy audios, and shaky cam, inviting a sense of weirdness to them. They take from the same vessel where often the personal and political merge to form a better, bigger understanding of humans. At the level of production, they maintain the realism and small-scale storytelling that had always been Sen’s hallmark. They continue to sit in contrast with the grandiose fantasies, singing and dancing of mainstream Hindi films and open a window to the audience – to delve into the movies as archives to critically examine and comprehend Sen’s legacy in full.
In a way, these shorts felt like they were blending into mood of the moment. They helped us reappraise people around us, returning to old forms of feelings, however mouldy and patchy. Sen is known to have said that it’s very important for the viewer to cultivate himself to be able to understand films. Famous for not going by the concept of a “film for the masses”, Sen’s films did not point fingers or suggest direct solutions. They made the audience question themselves, forcing us into a discipline of introspection. In the subtle stances, simple perspectives and bare positions, these characters seem to effloresce into learned conclusions, embodying the filmmaker’s ideology and revealing why he chose to make movies for the “scattered minority audience around the world”.
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In a career spanning over six decades (1956-2002), Sen made 27 full-length feature films, 14 shorts and four documentaries. Born in 1923 in the small town of Faridpur in modern-day Bangladesh, Sen immigrated to Kolkata with his family with 12 siblings in the forties. He made his directorial debut with Raat Bhore in 1955.
As a child two events deeply impacted his artistic vision—the great Bengal famine during World War II and the funeral of Rabindranath Tagore. These resulted in a vision that sublimated into a clear and solid position that it was creativity that will be his compass as a filmmaker.
In these shorts we see hues of Sen’s humanity.
A lost lover, looking back and trying to trace her former love, in After A Decade and The Anniversary show two different sides of the same coin. Aparna Sen in After A Decade trying to find her way back to Karnad, is sympathetic and hesitant. Even if she has her reasons for having left Karnad all those years ago, she does not want to impose herself on him. She waits for him to catch up on the hints, cues she leaves scattered all around. Whereas in The Anniversary, Dhritiman Chatterjee as the lover left behind by Deepti Naval’s sudden change of plans is a stalker, threatening to extract revenge in the form of self-harm. Here, Sen leaves it up to the audience to understand the myriad differences between a woman and man as lovers and leavers.
In this, the shorts take forward his expansive definition of political films to the ones that meant films on “man-woman relations”. In an interview, Sen said, “I make films, I make films about situation around me…And what is political and not political that I do not know. You can make a relationship between a man and women politically. To make films politically and make political films are two different things.”
Not only do these shorts works on teasing out buried feelings between former lovers, but also between siblings. A sister delineates on the astringencies she has long held against her sibling for having stolen her lover back in time, in Two Sisters. Time has passed, she had pretended as if nothing affected her then, but now she feels protected by the same passage of time and remembers in various details the ways in which her sister had stolen the heart of the man she loved in front of her eyes. These are minutely moral, but largely social stories, revealing the everyday crises in the Indian middle class, much like Sen’s feature films which were also conversant in similar issues, clothed in different stories.
The short that stands the test of time is Modern Times. The camerawork is shaky, the audio wavers in and out, but the central theme is one for the ages. One of the comments under the movie sums it up perfectly: “A delightful and sensitive handling of what must be a familiar situation in many households, the son makes a female friend and the parents allow their imagination to run riot!” Parents looking at the life and times of their son, observing his friendship with a woman, who they believe is his lover, and then laughing it off when they discover it’s not the case.
A few things are underfoot here.
The social milieu, a certain economic stratum of the Indian middle class, their mellow attitude towards a female friend of their son dipping in and out of his room at all hours of the day, stoked by a strange, if fleeting, Marxist stance in the brusque callousness of the son. While watching the short, I wrote sternly in the margins of my notepad, “as Mrinal-esque as it gets”. The 23-minute short is almost a small-scale simulacrum of an upper middle class Indian household in any metropolitan Indian city, even in 2021.
These shorts heave with the heat of living, survey the discrepancies of their own era, covered in a miasma of empathy, a cool detachment, and a penetrating gaze. They are so deeply eked out, it’s easy to disappear into them for weeks, as if between curtains of heavy rain. Through these shorts, Sen’s cinematic world has held its own with immense equanimity, even as the social world around it has blithely pretended to change.
Devouring these shorts, the audience believed they could sense every nuance of personality, impulse, emotion, expression, or artifice of the characters, their milieu. The people came witheringly alive, celebrating, mourning, departing, growing, loving, living, and dying all around us. These shorts are not merely cinema; they are too big for their own vessel, spilling out carelessly. But because we are human, we need stories, we need cinema. And so, we traipse away from them, however reluctantly, carrying them with a density of feeling, like a wellspring for all the emotions and feelings we buried somewhere long ago.
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