And/Or

And/Or

Gate.Googled

Sanjiv Shah, Editing 1981

Memory is a great conundrum. It always has a take on your life quite different from your own. Sights, smells, sounds, events, experiences; all assume a significance separate from what your conscious self might have assigned them at the moment.

Jog it a bit for specifics of that past, and it comes up with iconic images that at best represent a collation of several rather than one. Like when I think of FTII, I am always presented with this image of the Main Gate. Extremely vivid; but not exactly as I might have seen it for the first time in 1977. Representing not just that first moment I laid my eyes on the campus but a swell of moments from my years there.

I often wonder why it has to be the gate, and not, say the Main Theatre or the Hostel or the Canteen. Why, for god’s sake, not the Wisdom Tree. Try as I do, each hit on the replay button brings up the same; a variation of the image of the Main Gate. Maybe, we Indians have a thing about gates. Go to any moffusil town or city in India and you would be crisscrossing gates traveling from one road to the other. Travel to any part of Kutch post the earthquake and the landscape is dotted with gates of all shapes and sizes; leading to towns, villages, streets or nowhere; immortalizing, as it were, the town, the village, the Lions Club or the politician who collected the dosh from willing donors and sponsored the building of the gate from a small portion of the loot.

Gates, then, become significant both as entry points to a location and devices for intransience. You remember a place and the moment by the gate you entered it from, forever. And since my first introduction to that world was this very gate; the image of the Main Gate at 4, Law College Road has become my portal to a part of my own world of the past; to revisit those years spent at the FTII and from there on to the world of cinema that I have intermittently inhabited for the past 25 years.

It was sometime in early 1977 that this happened:

Having for long decided that formal education was designed solely to domesticate livestock, that true learning could happen only on the job in the real world and the desire to learn filmmaking having gripped me like a fever, on a balmy winter morning I dialed a six digit number on the ubiquitous public phone on the roadside in Calcutta.

The phone rings.
‘Hello.’ a deep baritone on the other side as someone lifts the receiver.
‘Um.. err.. Good Morning, Sir. Is that Mr. Ray’s residence?’ Me, meekly.
‘Yes.’ the baritone deepens.
‘ Uh, may I speak with Mr. Ray, please?’ Me again, very meekly.
‘ SPEAKING.’ The baritone now changes into the voice of GOD.

What followed was a rather swift slaying of my dream of securing an apprenticeship with Mr. Satyajit Ray, he telling me that the only new person he was willing to tolerate on his unit, other than the most indispensable crew (he had already dispensed with Mr. Subroto Mitra by then) was an editor, and since I was not equipped to edit I had to look elsewhere for my education in film making.

Having fared no better with Mrinal Sen and not quite able to get the film bug out of my system I decided to do the next best thing. A strategic retreat on the politics of formal education and a trip ASAP to Pune where I had heard of a place where they actually taught how to make films. That is when I first laid my eyes on the gates of the Film Aani Television Sansthan, in the Winter of 1977. The rest, as they say, is history. Pretty much as would have happened with anybody who may read this. Except for one small detail, maybe, which was that I never managed to get past the gate on that first visit, having been told in three effective sentences that the applications forms would be available only later, they can be procured by post and any aira-gaira from the roadside cannot just up and walk into the campus (which was a damned lie, the third part, as I was to discover later), so I may please head back to where I came from.

Quite understandably the Main Gate, which subsequently became for me the doorway to the world of cinema, then plays a lead role in my memories of the Film Institute. Of course, apart from that first encounter much else happened at the Main Gate during the years I spent at FTII. The several strikes during which the mobs were herded there at the drop of a hat; the evening tea and the dhaba outside the gate, or at Nainan’s across from the gate, the public phone which was our version of the ATM and internet café rolled into one. All else that happened in the ensuing three years followed from the gate; as it were.

What distinguishes memories of life from experiencing it while living it is the simple fact that there are no jump cuts in life; no compression of time. It is only later that we can edit out the unwanted, the uninteresting and the badly shot when we choose to revisit those moments. Memories, in that sense, are that much closer to cinema.

In all the years I spent there, FTII lay unraveled only in a sequence. I walked from the Main gate to the Main Theatre; on to the Hostel. In the morning I came down the incline to the canteen, walked a few steps to the Wisdom Tree, was reluctantly hauled into the editing rooms by Kakaji… Rarely ever; never in fact, was I able to make that jump from the canteen to the hostel without traversing the prescribed paths which took me sometimes to the sound studio, sometimes to the labs; occasionally to the CRT and once in a while to Classroom 3 for a lecture on Acting. Except of course on those intermittent occasions when excessive consumption of the good things in life clouded my senses and wiped out knowledge of the physical journeys I made to reach from spot A to spot B. But that is not part of the story!

Walking up and down the road; your vision proscribed by principles of perspective, the campus unfolded in a particular manner. Each turn of the road, each turn of the head, revealed a peculiarity specific to that turn and it was a sum total of these vignettes that formed in my mind the whole image of FTII which till date I carry with me. Just as the sum total of what I learned in classrooms, from various teachers and other staff members, on shoots and on the streets is what makes up my education in FTII – minus, of course, the sum total of all that I was not taught at the FTII; which was equally substantial!!

My own home movie of the times at FTII, in my mind’s eye, always opens with image of the Main Gate from where I make those journeys; traverse those paths that I so often did before I arrive at the events and moments that I cherished; or dreaded. It is in those journeys that the meditation of the time and space happened and it is this recall of the intangible that makes the remembrance so special; so unique for each of us.

The lived becomes the remembered almost in the manner of editing the rushes to make a completed film or films. Like with film or video rushes it is possible to make versions, to alter the cut somewhat each time, but like with films, once cut, it replays in the same order. The sequences are as preordered and nothing but a fresh cut can alter that. Remembering FTII so, starting at the Main gate and travelling from there, is the closest to the sense of cinema that I know; and rejoice in. The Main Gate at 4, Law College Road is the address that I would desire to know FTII by, always.

I am told now that all that might change. That FTII could well have a new address. Courtesy Messrs Larry Page and Sergey Brin, FTII has been googled. At 18’ 30’ N 73’ 49’ E on Google Earth you can see the Film Institute nestled amongst the trees, amidst the network of roads snaking around it. You can see it clearly and you can see it whole.

From a height of 1900 ft; from a mile above; you can fly from 5 kms above New York to a spot almost atop the roof of Studio 1 (a bit pixilated, but will do). In short, the stuff of dreams when one dreamt of the campus at FTII. Presented with a hard/soft copy of that dream though, it’s the sort of stuff that I am not sure I am ready for.

What it does to me, this merchandise from the digital realm, is to scramble my memory the moment I lay my eyes on it. Try as I will, look at it from afar, tilt it and try to mimic a walk through from the Main Gate upwards (not quite happening; that) it just refuses to allow me the freedom to roam as I would; or as I did. Instead of the single icon of the Main Gate that was stored in my subconscious self, I am now presented with a collage of actual images which I can never fully associate with my experiences at the FTII. Never having seen it like that, to relive the walk from the hostel to the Main theatre to see Seven Samurai by looking at the Studio 1 roof would require a leap of imagination that only the best songs in a Hindi (or Tamil, or Telegu) film would dare to take. The Wisdom Tree from up there looks like any other tree dotting the campus; robbed of the aura that I have invested it with.

The best stories and films are those that tell you little while allowing you to inhabit the world they describe; to imagine the untold or the veiled. Like a bad film or a crude pornographic picture, FTII at 18’ 30’ N 73’ 49’ E tells me all; reveals all. Or, the problem for me, and for a lot of the children of the analog age, is that it does not correspond to the idea of films that I have grown up with; and what my memories of a place and time are constructed as. It mimics more a multimedia presentation where all I need to do is click on a link and pick up a narrative at will, randomly; even beyond the logic of my wildest imagination. And I still prefer the darkness of a cinema hall where the larger than life image carries me to a world that someone else has created for me over the small computer screen where my mouse determines the contours of someone else’s world; or other mice alter my own.

Of late, I do not dream of my days at the FTII; I have nightmares. Does the change in address have anything to do with it? I wonder.