At The Edge

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On 27th February I was going to catch Oscars but ended up getting hooked to Doordarshan which was showing an incredible documentary on Guru Dutt. The image of a young Guru Dutt doing snake dance was good enough reason, but then the makers of this documentary managed to talk to two of his earliest heroines. Shyama Shyama in Aar Paar (1954) Kum Kum Kum Kum in Aar Paar (1954) -0-

Still of 'The Scene' Choti Bahu (Meena Kumari) summons Bhootnath (Guru Dutt), he must accompany her to a nearby shrine, she wants to pray for her paralytic husband who has now asked her to give up drinking. There might still be some hope. They get into a buggy and are on their way into the night. The camera focuses on two and in the background a song plays in the voice of  Hemant Kumar. Somewhere in the song a desolant Choti Bahu gently  puts her head in Bhootnath's lap, the audience suddenly goes ecstatic, there is much hooting, whistling, and catcalls. Minutes later, Choti Bahu is again murdered, this time by goons of her husband's elder brother. Scenes of  pandemonium are repeated by audiences in theaters all across the country while watching that scene in Sahib Bibi Aur Gulam (1962). They see something explicit in this scene from a film full of subtleties. An embarrassed director of the film,...

Dream Merchants, Politicians & Partition: Memoirs of an Indian Muslim (1997, Harper Collins, Pages: 152; Rs:95) by Iqbal Masud Born F G Jilani in late 1920s into a South Indian Muslim family, his father a officer in education department under British government and his mother a burqa wearing Khilafat activist puritan Muslim woman, the contradictions, as he recounts it, were present in his life from the very beginning. The memoir starts in early thirties with an eight year old Iqbal Masud, seated between his burqa clad mother and aunt, in the balcony of a theatre, and him almos t managing to catch Sulochana and Dinshaw Billimoria kiss on the screen ( in year 1935 talkie film 'Anarkali'). But the scene, at the last moment, gets censored out as his aunt clamps her hand down upon his eager eyes.    F G Jilani became critic-writer Iqbal Masud - Iqbal for his favorite poet and Masud his urf , a name 'adopted for various administrative and self-preservatory reason (the ...

Pyaasa (1957) by Guru Dutt . Possibly one of the most remarkable transpositions of poetry on screen. Dutt plays the poet himself and when he says the verses, he actually sings (using the beautiful voice of Mohammad Rafi). It's just out of this world. More than once I've had tears in my eyes listening to the audio tape I bought in Delhi in the late eighties. ~ French filmmaker Olivier Assayas in Sight and Sound magazine on the topic of The Best Music in Film. The question asked of him: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much? Music of Pyaasa was not his first choice, instead his first choice was: "With not a second of hesitation David Mansfield's music for Heaven's Gate " Besides its music Heaven's Gate (1980) is famous for being the film that sank the studio United Artists. Olivier later in the article comments that “[Music in Pyaasa is] even sadder than the music in Heaven's Gate.” -0- The French d...

Guru Dutt, The Romantic in Hindi Cinema If ever there was a passionate romantic in Hindi Cinema, it was Guru Dutt. He was perhaps the only one to create something of a personal cinema within the commercial format, complete with song and dance. He is the one who came nearest to a form fashioned out of drama, story and song, with one complementing rather than interrupting the other. He also combined the most romantic elements of both Urdu – Muslim and Bengali- Hindu culture. I found these lines scribbled in a diary of a dear cousin brother of mine. Searching for the source of these lines about Guru Dutt, I found that these lines were written by Chidananda Dasgupta , filmmaker, film critic, film historian and one of the founders of Calcutta Film Society along with Satyajit Ray in 1947, a man passionate about Cinema of Guru Dutt and Ritwik Ghatak . The source of the lines turned out to be an article written by Chidananda Das Gupta titled New Directions in Indian Cinema , leven pages...

Directed by Guru Dutt in 1957, Pyaasa is a proclaimed and a much-acclaimed classic of the Indian Hindi Cinema. A movie worth re-viewing because after each viewing, it manages to convey some new message to us that we, might have failed to notice in last viewing. The movie is symbol-laden. It is crawling with symbols. During each viewing, a person can find some new symbol. A line from a song in the movie: Ye Dunia agar mil bhee jaye to kya hai. The protagonist rejects fame but only after achieving it. He doesn’t commit suicide or die. Instead he walks away from it all after achieving it all. Hence, the moral triumph of his human spirit. Does this have echoes of the Indian concept of Renunciation found in our religious myths and our popular T.V serials. A line from another song in the movie: jinhen naaz hai hind par woh kahaan hain Critics tell us that this line is a telling remark on the post Nehruvian India. How would the international community make this connection? In a w...