GFF 2011: No Singing, No Dancing

Two of my most memorable movie-going experiences involve Indian cinema, or cinemas to be precise. The first was watching The Phantom Menace dubbed in Hindi; even being unable to understand a single syllable of the lumber that passed for a script, I recognised this was muggy ordure of the highest rank. My second encounter was far more cheery. Taken to see a Bollywood smash, the atmosphere was electric from the outset: dancing in the aisles, old and young singing along in unison, and whooping at the melodramatic prompts. This was cinema as it should be – classless, communal. Joyous.

Dhundiraj Phalke recognised this the moment he first glimpsed moving imagery in 1911. He quickly gave up his printing firm and went to learn about the nascent technology in Britain, and his pioneering story is dramatised in Harishchandrachi Factory. Phalke returned to create the country’s first feature in 1913, paving the way for a national film industry to rival that of his colonial oppressors.

Arguably the foremost poet of Indian cinema was Bengali humanist Satyajit Ray, a filmmaker noticeably absent from GFF’s ‘Beyond Bollywood’ programme. Debutant director Srijit Mukherji pays homage to Ray’s classic Nayak, which concerns a matinee idol stuck on a cross-country train journey who is forced to re-examine his life when interrogated by a young journalist. Mukherji’s Autograph looks to be a similarly corrosive study in the bitter sacrifices that underpin conformity to a heroic image of national status.

If one theme can be discerned in the strand, it is in a yearning to escape from the rigid expectations of an autocratic patriarchy. Kim Longinotto’s documentary Pink Saris follows a defiant group of females crusading for women’s rights, especially amongst the lower castes of society. The eponymous Little Zizou watches his brother endeavour to affect a romance despite the fierce objection of his devout father, whilst the teenage protagonist of Udaan struggles to pursue his dreams of becoming a writer in the face of his hard-drinking, disapproving father. And in Road, Movie, a young man desperate to avoid a future working for his dad, sets off into the desert in a truck, soon discovering that the vehicle was once a travelling cinema. The film sounds akin to an Eastern version of Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins’ ‘Pilgrimage’ across the Scottish highlands in Summer 2009.

In fact, it was in that year’s Edinburgh festival that Cousins screened Ritwik Ghatak’s elegiac, pungent A River Called Titash. It focuses on a small community of fishermen and depicts the way the river, so crucial in an Indian culture pulsing with the ebb and flow of the Ganges, reflects, threatens and ultimately transforms the lives of those who reside on its banks. Rounding off the season is The Ruins by veteran Mrinal Sen, perhaps the most experimental of the country’s auteur directors. Like a lot of his later work, it incessantly begs questions, and invites the audience into forming a myriad of conclusions, all contradictory and problematic.

This selection certainly promises to be ‘beyond Bollywood’. Yet, without the garish numbers and overcooked premises of that blockbuster factory, I hope that there’s a similar sense of the joyful community in the theatre that I felt over a decade ago. Indian cinema deserves it – far more than a Sanskrit-prattling Jar-Jar Binks.