by Arun Khopkar (Film Direction, 1974)

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

… any man's death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne

An event that changes you radically, sometimes comes stealthily, like a cat walking silently into your room or the light of early dawn, caress-opening your sleep-laden eyes and slowly rendering the world visible to stun you with its beauty. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all  " That is how the Japanese cinema entered my life.

It was a little past midnight as I, a green student, was walking to the film school hostel. I could see the lights of the classroom theatre burning. I changed my path and walked in on tiptoes as a film had just started.

It was a black and white film about a family, with aging parents and their grown-up children. The camera was always static, at eye level of a man sitting on the ground and the framing was in mid and long-shots, with no difference in the way minor and major characters were framed. The cutting had the ebb and flow of gentle sea.

The images began to reverberate. The father in the film merged with my retired father of about the same age. The mother dissolved into my mother, completely devoted and inseparable from her husband. A life far away from my world revealed my world to me in a new light. Was I watching the film or was the film watching me?

The décor was neutral the Japanese homes, bars and offices, creating a microcosm of life.

The peeling walls of my home came back to me, with its ordinary furniture, nibbled by sweat, bearing traces of years of use. Objects of every day use assumed magical qualities holding secrets of life that had flowed over them and was flowing over them.

The film was, Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’, as I learnt after the film was over. The film was long, over two hours.

Was it? Or was it timeless? Without a beginning and end, ready to flow in and out of my life? The film hasn’t ended for me. Now I am no longer the uncaring son but I am a father with a young son and daughter-in-law. They visit me occasionally and I wait for their call. But they are busy with their young lives. One day my young son will be an old father and will be waiting for his young son to call or to video-chat or whatever forms the Ozu film might take in the latter half of this century. Great works, like Phoenix, rise out of their own ashes. Sambhawami yuge yuge.

Was this Japanese cinema that I watched that changed my life and taught me to understand my parents? Taught me a sense of passing of all things - Mono no aware? Or was it an Indian Bodhisattva who returned to me via Japan? Was it a Japanese film of Yasujiro Ozu that I watched as I walked along the dimly lit caves of Ajanta? Or was it a fresco from Ajanta or a Jataka tale that I watched in the classroom theatre? I am still searching and I have no answers.

Ozu sensei also taught us to look carefully at each speck of colour by making six films in colour.  He whispered and murmured through colours as no other filmmaker before him or after him did. He created those neutral, silent backdrops for books, labels on beer bottles and otherwise ugly plastic buckets to compose wonderful symphonies of colours. Thin red rectangle of a book, a yellow neon sign, a blue table lamp and you hear the music of spheres.

Ozu also made us to look at frames without characters; frames with washing lines, chimneys and rooftops, made us understand that cinema is everywhere and everything. He returned us to the auguries of innocence,

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

After doing all this, he is still invisible to us, like a Hidden God, paring his fingernails after he created the world. The work is all that matters; the man who creates it is nothing. The style is all.

Ozu enriched cinema by impoverishing it of all embellishment. He showed us and made us hear and see the silent shunya, Kurosawa came to us like Lord Shiva, the destroyer. He wrote with thunder and lightning in ‘Ran’, and made rivers of blood flow before he unfurled the flag of Amitava Buddha. He took on the mighty Shakespeare and rewrote Macbeth with fog and howling wind in Japanese ideograms and returned to the silence of the snowflakes as death and birth met on a swing/cradle in Ikiru.

Just a few miles away from the city of Mumbai, the heartland of the Hindi films - now called Bollywood - lies the island of Elephanta. There stands the famous seventh century Trimurti of Lord Shiva, as the progenitor, the preserver and the destroyer. To see this sculpture, one of the greatest Cinemascope close-ups in the history of world art, is an awe-inspiring experience. It suggests to us more than it shows. Kurosawa Akira captures its power in many of his films. The masculine dance, tandava, that appears in the choreography of his films using martial arts makes us realize the terrible beauty of perfection of destruction. Like the images of Elephanta, he has created visionary, elemental and monumental images aspiring to last for centuries.

Complementing tandava is lasya, the dance of the feminine, depicting its suffering, pining and sensuousness, its divinity and ordinariness. Many Japanese filmmakers have depicted the feminine in its myriad rupas – forms and appearances – from elegant to coarse, with compassion and understanding, inventing different forms of cinema in the process.

I met my mother, my sisters, lovers, and grandmothers in Japanese cinema. How many times I caught an expression in these films that I had seen in the life around me, a gesture, an intonation – yes, even an intonation, though the language was Japanese – a laughter, a sigh, a smile…full of authenticity. Nothing fake about it.

An intonation, a voice can make a person. Just a voice with no source image makes an acousmêtre; someone who exists only as a voice. Mizoguchi Kenji has created such a character. It is the mother in Sansho, the Bailif, existing through her song her children. And only a feminine ear, the daughter’s, could hear this song.

After the loss of my mother, I have heard her voice, in that half-awake state, where the boundaries between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’ become blurred. It was a lullaby that comes back to me.

Not only Mizoguchi Kenji, but Naruse Mikio and Imamura Shohei have created remarkable women in their films.

Remarkable Japanese women? No, just remarkable women in Japanese guises. Women who inspire poets and women who are hard as nails because they have to create life, preserve life and nurture it. They can be like furies when aroused and tender as cherry blossoms. Durga and Kali.

I was in Beppu for an international film festival to I show my film. We were taken to the locations where Kurosawa Akira had shot Ran. I am not a religious man but those velvety green plains and hills partly covered in mist…they were sacred ground.  I felt like taking my shoes off before treading on them.

Those plains and those hills. How the Far Eastern painters captured all manifestations of nature around them and impregnated them with cosmic meanings! Their modern counterparts, be it Mizoguchi Kenji, Kurosawa Akira or any of the great Japanese filmmakers, they have made us understand how a lens can paint as memorably as a brush. Sunlight streaking through the woods, mist covering water, hills, and trees… all has come alive in the Japanese cinema. A pantheistic vision of a culture that knows how to worship even the most transient and fleeting appearances for catching the Eternal through them and is able to capture them in its arts.

But the Eternal comes in many forms and in multi-dimensional time. It beckons through the past, is invisible in the womb of the present and finds its fruition in the future. Japanese filmmakers find this Eternal through nuggets from the past and meticulously depicted present. What they have sown in the early years of their cinema has grown into a solid trunk of the present and is waving its branches pointing at the boundless sky of the future. All that we need is finely tuned ears and eyes and an open mind to see it.

This wonderful trove shown here in this festival is a fine selection of films from 1935 to 2004 that gives us an image of this mighty tree in camera obscura. It is not only a capsule history of the Japanese cinema; it is a picture of our times depicted by a culture that triumphed over the nuclear fire and soared above the world.

Archimedes had said, “Give me a point outside the Earth and a lever long enough and I’ll lift the Earth.” This packet of films; will it give us a point outside ourselves to look at our cinema? With what films of ours can we pay back for this priceless gift that comes to us? That is the question these great films pose for us. Let us prepare our answers.

“Arigato gozaimasu” is all that one can say presently for this priceless gift.

Arun Khopkar

email ID arunkhopkar@gmail.com

212 A Kalpataru Habitat CHS, S. S. Rao Road, Parel, Mumbai 400 012