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The continuing engagement of European and American directors with India, both as physical location and metaphorical conceit, was the theme of a three-week-long film series hosted by TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto’s Bell Lightbox.
The nine-film exposition held recently was titled Passages to India: India Seen by Outsiders. It turned the spotlight on a slew of much discussed Indian forays made by celebrated western directors over a period of a nearly half a century. The attempt was to understand the varied impulses and approaches that have informed these cinematic explorations. The selection ranged from 1947’s Oscar-winning Black Narcissus, filmed on a British soundstage by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, to contemporary French director Benoit Jacquot’s 2006 drama L’intouchable (The Untouchable), shot documentary-style on real locations in Varanasi. Western filmic takes on India span a wide array of narrative forms, form ethnographic observation to febrile dramatisation designed to underscore the visual beauty, the heat and dust and the bewildering contradictions of the land.
From the German silent film The Indian Tomb (1921) and the French production The Hindu Soul (1929) to the current crop of films such as Life of Pi, Eat Pray Love, The Darjeeling Limited and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, India has figured in varied ways in the global cinematic consciousness.
Over the decades, in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Gunga Din, Bhowani Junction, A Passage to India, Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire, India has provided a constantly changing backdrop to many American and European films, though not always with happy results. Inspired by Outsider Films on India 1950-1990, a book edited by film curator Shanay Jhaveri and published by Mumbai’s Shoestring Publishers in 2010, Passages to India highlighted the works of eight filmmakers, including Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Roberto Rossellini and Louis Malle. Four parts of Malle’s
controversial mini-series Phantom India, first While Malle’s documentary series was flayed by some as being too negative and one-sided and lacking in compassion, the French filmmaker himself regarded Phantom India as his most personal work. Jhaveri puts the uproar in perspective: "Phantom India provoked displeasure as it seemed to be portraying aspects of India that the government was not too pleased with. We have to remember that in the few decades after Indian independence, the leadership was invested in projecting a modernising India." He adds: "Some of the representations (in Phantom India) while not being outwardly or even at all critical might have been perceived as such." At the other end of the spectrum is the western filmmaker’s abiding fascination for the river Ganges and the ancient holy city of Varanasi that stands on its bank. They appear in many of the films screened in Toronto in July. Jhaveri was in the Canadian city to introduce two of the films in the package — American anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker Robert Gardner’s contemplative 1985 documentary Forest of Bliss and L’intouchable, about a young Parisian actress, who sets out for the banks of the Ganges in search of the Indian father she never met. A quest is also at the heart of Alain Corneau’s Nocturne Indien, in which a young Frenchman travels to India too look for a missing friend.
Gardner’s acclaimed Forest of Bliss, shot over the course of 24 hours — from one sunrise to the next — captures the everyday lives of denizens of Varanasi and explores the lanes and crematoria of the city. The provocative film, which is without any commentary or dialogue, transports viewers into a world that elicits both elation and gloom. "Varanasi," says Jhaveri, "easily appeals to an outsider’s mind which thinks of India as old, spiritual, wedded to tradition and unchanging`85 (But) the responses to Varanasi vary. There are certainly very dedicated bodies of work that have been realised on the city." The hotly and consistently debated Forest of Bliss is certainly one such film. Also in the Passages to India programme was a restoration of Jean Renoir’s masterly 1951 film The River, adapted from a Rumer Godden novel about three women growing up on the Ganges. Besides being the inspiration behind Wes Anderson’s decision to film in India (The Darjeeling Limited, 2007), The River is credited with drawing Satyajit Ray, then in the world of advertising, to the magic of cinema. Like Black Narcissus, based on the Rumer Godden novel of the same name set in a remote convent of nuns in the Himalayas, writer and director Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975) wasn’t filmed in India. Based on Duras’ own play about the adulterous wife of a French diplomat in India, the film was shot in a mansion in Paris. India Song is generally regarded as her crowning achievement as a filmmaker. Also screened was Lang’s two-part self-titled Indian Epic (1959) — The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb — completing a veritable cinematic tapestry.
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