And/Or

And/Or

Which film affected me the most at FTII…


Ranjan Das, Editing 1992

Daunting as it might appear to choose one film that has impressed me most from the plethora of films that I saw at the FTII, one film I fondly recollect is a Polish film - The Saragossa Manuscript by Wojciech Has. It is an intimidating task to summarize the plot because it defeats all lessons in story telling and screenplay manuals. The industry idiom ‘one-liner’ does not work either for this film and I had to look up the Internet to refresh my memory and this is how it goes: A young army captain discovers an old book (the Saragossa Manuscript) that tells the story of his grandfather who was a captain in some regiment who sought the shortest route through inhospitable mountain terrains. At an apparently deserted inn, he dines with two beautiful, Moorish princesses who tell him that they are his cousins and, as the last of the line, he must marry them both to provide heirs and just as he and us - the viewers, look forward to a probable ménage a trois, the captain wakes up and finds himself in a forbidding countryside lying next to a heap of skulls under a hanging post. He meets a hermit priest and a goatherd; each tells him their story; he wakes up again by the gallows. He is rescued from the Spanish Inquisition, meets a cabalist and hears more stories within stories…and so it goes until we were left wondering how the hell did we wind up here?


I remember all of us being dazzled by the film’s sumptuousness in terms of its visuals (B/W with widescreen format), a galaxy of voluptuous women, a gallery of colourful characters and the magical story telling that left us gasping for more. It transcended all notions of cinematic narrative that we thought we knew till then. Characters from the frame story came to inhabit the stories being recounted and then flew from one story to another story being narrated by some other character and we got happily lost in the maze. The film exuded unbridled energy and we never tired of the 3-hour roller coaster ride. It was surreal, witty, erotic, boisterous and sad at times; but at the end of it, taught us to be audacious when it came to thinking up story ideas. It is what the Great Indian Entertainment Cinema should be but unfortunately is not. It left us wondering about our rich oral and written traditions of story telling that cry out to be filmed in innovative manners but any effort towards which is thwarted by the tendency to play safe in view of the box office.

Anil Zankar, Direction 1979

In 1975, Jean Luc Godard seemed to be the North Star of cinema at FTII.

And so I watched Breathless with great anticipation in Semester I. But, the film baffled me. Having read Richard Roud’s book on Godard and parts of Godard on Godard was no help really.

Some more effort and screenings … and the film began to speak to me. A few years later I was using the film in my teaching. Today, I can say a few words of my own about it.

Post-1945, Europeans, Japanese, Ray had given cinema a middle-aged dignity and vibrancy. With Breathless cinema suddenly seemed to have begun young once again. Audacity, irreverence and self proclamation it is all there. Godard is saying with nonchalance … You get involved in story, character and plot but, here I am talking about Cinema. Being flamboyant, it is difficult to call Godard a minimalist, but that is what Breathless essentially is. When I think of the famous N H Tribune sequence, incredibly shot with the actors taking a walk and Coutard shooting them through the slit of the postman’s hand-cart which was being pushed by Godard himself, I marvel at the thought that here is a filmmaker who is saying to me … Look, you have a camera, film, light, actors and life around you and that is All you need to make a film. In this sense he is comparable to Grotowski who arrives at the definition of his Poor Theatre through via negativa.

“Beauty and truth have two poles – documentary and fiction and you can approach it with either …” is a statement that you begin to understand when you begin to understand Breathless.

Charudutt Acharya, Direction 1996

It was on a cold evening at FTII, just after ragging, that I saw Fellini’s La Strada. Those were the days when one was being exposed to new films and thus new theories on a daily basis. La Strada was termed as a Neo-realistic film in the league of Bicycle Thief and Rome Open City. Despite being an absolute novice to world cinema, I distinctly remember feeling a fundamental difference between La Strada and Bicycle Thief. The difference was that of a magical poetic brush stroke painted across every scene of La Strada. Here was a film that almost had a parable like quality and a sense of spectacle despite using many of the tools of the neo-realistic cinema. La Strada, for me was a superb study in human relationships and a strong human document seeped in universality. I think this was one film from which I took home the maximum nuggets of cinema education. Gulietta Masina’s first rate performance and Nino Rota’s superb background score linger on in my cinematic consciousness even today. La Strada remains an all time favorite because the maker so beautifully blends a very humane world-view with a highly personal & magical approach to the cinematic craft

Shan Mohammed, Editing 2006

Late in the night…
Sitting in the grubby new ‘viewing-room’…
A revelation that at last someone makes films in a way that I can understand!

First few days of the institute… bombarded with works of Tarkovsky, Eisenstein, Bresson,
Goddard, Bergman… basically, THE WORKS!

Then one night...
The proverbial light at the end of the road is at last visible.

A borrowed tape (Kieslowsky’s Trois Couleurs: Bleu) from the library…With headphones…
The first time when I could feel just what exactly the whole film wanted me to feel.
Basically, that I was not a freak to ask for a narrative of a more visible kind.

I have since seen & HEARD the movie a lot of times in various formats. And each time I find something new to appreciate about it. What’s really unique about the film (and its quite subtly done), is that most of the time it’s the heard elements that make a lot more contribution to the narrative than the visual ones. Ranging from the opening hospital sequences, through the empty house, the music sheets, the apartment to the final struggle with the composition, it’s remarkable the way the visuals are used as something that just about supports the sound design of the film. And it’s not just used in parts of the film as a style, but more like the actual narrative.

To me, it was the smartest use of sound & visuals, in that order, in the telling of a story. The best judge of what the sound design actually contributes to the film is to hear a film without watching it. Try that with this one!

Later on I was badly scarred by Kieslowsky’s Decalogue…lifted up again with Double Life of Veronique…discovered Antonioni, Billy Wilder, Ozu (the narrative ones!)…

But what still stays with me is Bleu, the first film that actually opened my eyes to the way I want to tell stories.

Irene Dhar Malik, Editing 1992

To pick one film amongst the ones one viewed as FTII as having affected one the most is tough. One has hated a film in one viewing and considered it a masterpiece in the next. I will pick Meghe Dhaka Tara which I had seen once before joining FTII. As the film begins, you gradually forget the tea glasses rolling down the aisle, the latecomers, the early leavers, cigarettes being lit…the usual MT paraphernalia.

A story about an ordinary woman with dreams - some ordinary, some a little more than ordinary, caught in an ordinary maze of poverty, disease, betrayal, loss. An ordinariness that is so easy to identify with, probably because a lot of us have often wished to be an ordinary person capable of extraordinary courage, and the ability to sacrifice. No, I don’t remember the exact emotions that I felt when I watched the film. But I do remember getting goose pimples when the brother sings ‘Je rate mor dwar.’ I do remember being deeply moved when the hills resonate with Khuki’s cry to her brother that she too had wanted to live. Sometimes, life just passes one by… it doesn’t even matter that you’ve lived, felt pain, died…Another day, another ordinary woman with a torn chappal…You leave the hall in silence, awed by a simple story simply told by a man who also sat under the wisdom tree.

Jyothi Kapur Das, Editing 1995

Smoking/No Smoking directed by Alain Resnais blew me because it was unlike any film I had seen. It was really long, it had these stagy theatrical sets, it had (as I learned later) just two actors, one male and one female, who played multiple characters in the film, and, the most interesting thing was that the story moved forward in various tangents – different endings which were the result of the different decisions that the characters take.

Wow! I had thought I was being incredibly inspired and innovative when I had the idea of doing a film about multiple futures. And, here I was watching it done in a very engrossing, funny film – truly hatke!

The actors were good, the dialogues were witty, the screenplay fantastic. Watching this film, I learnt that so much could be done with such few resources if the script is tight and clever enough. Obvious, I am sure, but it’s a fact filmmakers usually forget.

So, here I am, revealing my ‘commercial’ streak when I choose this film, among all the classics we were shown!

Amit Tyagi, Editing 1982 and Post Diploma, Direction 1985

How does one write about the film watching days at FTII without recollecting the purity of Andrei Tarkovosky's The Stalker or the majesty of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai or the passion of Fellini 's 8 ½ and power of Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha; not to mention half a dozen others.

But if came down to one film that moved me the most, marked a milestone in my life, it’s definitely Satyajit Ray's Aparajito (The Unvanquished). I had seen the film in college, travelled across Delhi to gate-crash into a screening at another film society, and been moved to tears - it was my story at the age of eighteen! It would be correct that along with M S Sathyu's Garam Hawa it was one of the films that moved me to filmmaking; Aparajito showed me the possibilities of the cinema.

Then at FTII one came to realize the immense power of Ray's filmmaking skills and how right he had been in depicting the humanity of his characters. Prof Bahadur, Arun Khopkhar and Surendar Chawdhary pointed out the flavours of Aparajito in all their richness. But it remained that most personal of favourites - the one that depicted the movements of one's life. Looking back, it depicted the lives of all individuals coming to terms with their own individuality. But as in all great art, when you watch Aparajito, it’s only talking to you and depicting your life experiences.

What more can I say, critics like Robin Wood have pointed out its meanings in detail, Subroto Mitra used to explain its visuals in detail (in our days at FTII). But Ray's artistry as a filmmaker had peaked so early in his career; I could never get over that.