The legend lives on

Shoma A. Chatterji on director Mrinal Sen who has been chosen for this year’s lifetime achievement award at Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema

Veteran Bengali filmmaker Mrinal Sen, who turned 85 this month, will be honoured with the lifetime achievement award at Osian’s-Cinefan 10th Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, on July 10 in Delhi. A pioneer of the alternative cinema movement, Sen made films like Bhuvan Shome, Ek Din Achanak and Mrigaya. Mrinal Sen is not just a name. He is a legend. He represents an era that survives and reflects itself through him. He is the lone ranger in a track now filled with other people, other cinemas, and other worlds. But he holds on to his principles. The anger of yesteryear has given way to a strange cynicism, a sort of biting satire that is charismatic enough to attract you, and scary enough to pull yourself away. His alacrity and his nervous energy surprise you.

"Anecdotes make life interesting. Theory is boring," he says. When he was 17-years-old, his parents sent him to Calcutta to study for a degree in a college. "One the eve of my departure to the great city — just to put my parents in an uncomfortable situation — I asked them if, so far, they could notice a streak of genius in me. As expected, taken unawares, they felt visibly awkward. I immediately asked them not to worry and quoted one of the greatest thinkers of the contemporary world who said: "All are genius up to the age of ten." Assured, my parents had no choice but to give me the benefit of doubt."

German filmmaker Reinhard Hauff made an 82-minute documentary on Mrinal Sen on 16 mm in 1986. It was called Ten Days in Calcutta – A Portrait of Mrinal Sen. Hauff did not make an objective, biographical documentary on the director. Instead, he chose to divide his attention between Calcutta and Mrinal Sen. The film strikes a balance between Hauff’s impression of the social reality of a metropolis and as portrayed in Sen’s films. Hauff sought to identify Sen’s approach to the city, its inner and outer realities, an approach that Hauff chose to describe as ‘critical realism.’

Between 1956 and 2002, Mrinal Sen made 28 full-length feature films, a couple of documentaries and two television serials. His feature films are mainly in his mother tongue, Bengali, though he has also made films in Hindi, one in Telugu and one in Oriya. Sen is one director who made films in languages he does not know, like Oriya and Hindi at a time when Bengali directors seemed to be fiercely parochial about making films in Bengali only.

But Sen never believed in defining for himself an exclusive linguistic identity as a filmmaker. "I am totally against this Bengali chauvinism of making films in Bengali alone. This narrowness closes us to the rest of the world. Besides, it is not as difficult to make a film in an unknown Indian language as people generally make out. Regional peculiarities are always there, in the shape of physiognomy, food habits, dress styles, dialects, words, etc. If one can grasp these properly, which is not difficult for any Indian, one can easily make a film in the language of any Indian region. Granted that it is easier for me to make a film in Bengali than in another language. But that itself evolves into a challenge which I love to meet", says this extremely articulate man.

Like their maker, Sen’s films have journeyed thematically from contemporary social and political crises to an examination of the inner journeys of individuals. Moving from formal dramaturgy to non-narrative searing statements to some searching self-analysis, the filmmaker tries to sustain a balance among his commitment to (a) the story placed in a particular time setting, (b) his medium, cinema, to which he owes his ideological obligations and (c) his time, which "sits on my neck." These are, in his words, the ‘three mistresses’ he has been serving.

Awards don’t matter to him anymore. Most of his archival clippings, posters, press coverages and photographs are in France which bestowed on him the honour of Commander de L'orde des Arts et des Letters and also held a retrospective of his films, a rare honour for an Indian filmmaker. USSR gave him the Soviet Land Nehru Award and he has won numerous awards at international film festivals like Cannes, Berlin, Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Chicago, Montreal and Carthage. He was awarded a Padma Bhushan in 1980 while the West Bengal Government conferred upon him the Satyajit Ray Memorial Award in 1994. At the National Film Awards, his films have won four Golden Lotuses while he himself has bagged four Silver Lotuses as Best Director. Few Indian filmmakers can boast of nearly 10 books written on him in at least three Indian languages. Mrinal Sen is one of them while the other two are Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. While Ray and Ghatak are no more, underscoring the immunity of death to genius, Sen lives on.

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