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THE biggest upset, and perhaps the only major surprise, of this year’s Oscar night was Taiwanese-born American filmmaker Ang Lee beating the odds-on favourite, Steven Spielberg, to the statuette for "best achievement in directing". But nobody had any reason to complain — if anything, Lee’s triumph sparked a wave of celebration all around — because, for one, Life of Pi, based on Yann Martel’s much-lauded novel about a shipwrecked Indian boy, who is hurled by fate into an incredible voyage of discovery on the high seas, was as life-affirming a film as any that was made in the past year. That apart, in a 20-year directing career, Lee has earned quite a reputation for springing surprises and scooping up major awards. The versatile director has never repeated himself and has moved from one genre to another, one theme to another, one culture to another with amazingly consistent mastery. He is probably the only director alive today, who has two Oscars, two Golden Globes, two Golden Bears (in Berlin) and two Golden Lions (in Venice) in his swelling kitty. The only major filmmaking award that has so far eluded him is the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, although he has competed for it twice — in 1997 with The Ice Storm and in 2009 with Taking Woodstock. His first big victory on US soil was at the Golden Globes in 2006. Lee’s Brokeback Mountain won in as many as four categories, including best dramatic film, best director and best screenplay. The film then went on to fetch him the directing Oscar, making him the first-ever filmmaker of Asian descent to win the prize. Lee is today a global force to reckon with, one of the finest directors in the business. He is celebrated for his ability to infuse every tale he brings to the big screen with both humanity and philosophy. This hallmark of his art and craft was abundantly evident in Life of Pi. Until his Brokeback Mountain swept all before it, he was best known the world over for the sweeping martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In 2000, the film redefined the world’s engagement with the colour, flourish and energy inherent in Chinese fantasy. Lee has made the act of scooping up high-profile awards a bit of a habit. The rich haul of Oscars that Life of Pi has bagged is only the latest, and it will certainly not be the last, in a long line of accolades that have come the filmmaker’s way. Lee had won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival two decades ago with his second feature, The Wedding Banquet, about a gay Taiwanese New Yorker, who seeks to hide his sexuality from his conservative parents by playing out the charade of a conventional marriage. But it was his third film, Eat Drink Man Woman, which fetched him international recognition on both sides of the Pacific. There has been no looking back for him since then. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon made history at the Oscars in 2000, winning a clutch of awards in the principal categories, besides the one for best foreign-language film. In 1995, Lee made his first English-language film, a skilful and faithful adaptation of the Jane Austen classic Sense and Sensibility, with Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson playing pivotal on-screen roles. The unqualified commercial success of the film, which got him his second Golden Bear, catapulted the director to the Hollywood big league. Lee’s directorial oeuvre is an amazingly eclectic mix of stories and genres. It includes that underrated comic book fantasy of a decade ago, Hulk, which he now credits as the film that gave him the confidence to attempt the CGI-heavy Life of Pi. He has, over the years, helmed a diverse array of films like The Ice Storm, a social drama; Brokeback Mountain, a gay love story about two cowboys; Lust, Caution, an espionage thriller set in World War II era Shanghai; and Taking Woodstock, a fun-laden take on the 1969 rock’n’roll concert that became the world’s biggest ever counterculture celebration. It is not without reason that the New York University film school-trained Lee is regarded as one of the most audacious and inventive filmmakers active today. Brokeback Mountain, adapted from a short story, reoriented the western completely by narrating a tender homosexual love story involving two rugged cowboys. The film raked up some controversy in the US, but the critics and discerning moviegoers fell hook, line and sinker for it. Brokeback Mountain was the first-ever film with a gay theme to win a Golden Globe for Best Picture. It unfortunately lost out to Paul Haggis’ Crash — many felt that the film deserved to win the Oscar too. Misses have been rather rare in Lee’s career. At 58, he is only in mid-flight. The master experimenter has many years of creative exploration left in him. Film buffs can only wait with anticipation for his next foray, as they have done for every new Ang Lee film.
Celluloid Man
Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, a FTII graduate, committed to the preservation and restoration of films has documented the life and work of P. K. Nair to sustain for posterity, the significance of building up an archive of films. Nair has made it possible for us to know Dadasaheb Phalke through clips from films Raja Harishchandra and Kalia Mardan. Celluloid Man charts the journey of this man, who wandered to every corner of the country to find out three lost and almost very old clips from Imperial Films or Sohrab Modi’s classic Sikandar, Bombay Talkies’ Achyut Kanya through Chandralekha to Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara. When he retired, he left behind a priceless treasure of 12,000 films of which 8,000 are Indian films he has helped preserve and archive can by can, reel by reel. The film unfolds the history of Indian cinema as it grew over time in terms of technology, time, space and genres. Shivendra Singh Dungeshwar says, "I had read an interview with Martin Scorsese about the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, where they screened restored films. This inspired me to meet P.K. Nair in Pune. He was still staying just outside the Archive. The meeting brought back all memories of the time I spent at the FTII when Mr Nair had shown us so many wonderful films." "I found the Archive orphaned after Nair’s retirement in 1990. One saw rusting cans lying in the grass, thick cobwebs hanging from the shelves in the vaults and Nair’s old office turned into a junkyard. I thought about this remarkable man, who had devoted his life to collecting and saving these films. I was determined that his legacy should not be forgotten," says Dungarpur. The film is dotted with scenes showing the old man leaning on his walking stick as he moves inside the narrow gaps between shelves that hold endless round tin boxes of reels of film, sometimes framed by overhanging celluloid strips here, there and everywhere. Celluloid Man is shot against a live backdrop of old film clips, with famous old songs, or dialogue from old films interspersed with comments from great personalities of Indian cinema.
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A classic documentary, Celluloid
Man, is based on the life of P.K. Nair, the founder-director of
the first and largest cinema archive in India. He founded the National
Film Archive, Pune, in 1964 and is singularly responsible for
restoring and rescuing films virtually lost to history over his long
relationship with NFAI till 1991. The 164-minute long Celluloid Man
is travelling right now to the many festivals it has been invited to
for screening.