An Agent of Cultured Rage
Mrinal Sen was born on May 14, 1923, in Faridpur, in a country which would over the century become first East Pakistan, and then Bangladesh. His father, a lawyer at the district court, introduced in him the spirit of protest. At Faridpur College, Sen joined the student wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). When he moved to Calcutta, in 1940, to study at Scottish Church College, he got involved in the Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA), the cultural wing of the CPI. Here he met actor Gita Shome, who would later become his wife. It was also here that he met Ritwik Ghatak, the filmmaker.
If the aesthetics and politics of IPTA plays moved Sen, he would take time to warm up to cinema as a vocation. He was, instead, interested in reading about cinema — Rudolph Arnheim’s The Art Of The Film, Spottiswoode’s Romance of The Movies, Vladimir Nilsen’s Cinema As A Graphic Art. This was around the time director Satyajit Ray and critic Chidananda Dasgupta, who had founded the Calcutta Film Society — in 1947, the first film society in India — were among those who held screenings, inviting directors like Jean Renoir and John Huston when they visited India, and publishing works of criticism and interviews. Soon, Sen began writing about cinema, only to eventually be pushed into making cinema and in this way, deepening his moorings in Calcutta.
Mrinal Sen’s son, Kunal noted of his father, “Unlike his friend Ritwik Ghatak, he (Sen) was not significantly affected by the Partition. He came to Calcutta of his own will and accepted it as his home.” Sen was, instead, haunted by images of the Bengal Famine of 1942. Ray and Sen, having dismissed commercial Bombay cinema, looked instead to world cinema. While Ray was entranced by Hollywood personalities like John Ford and Frank Capra, Sen was moved by Eisenstein and Pudovkin. One third of the Satyajit Ray-Ritwik Ghatak-Mrinal Sen triumvirate that animates our grasp over film history, Sen moved in ways that were distinct from the other two. Each was preoccupied with a unique brand of realism that they stylistically pursued in their distinctive ways, centred around the social flux of their time.
The city of Calcutta itself would shape-shift over the decades and its prominence would wane. In the 1930s with the founding of the New Theatres studio in Tollygunge — from which Bengali cinema got its ugly moniker ‘Tollywood’ — cinema flourished in the city. Two decades later, a wealth of talent had migrated to Bombay and with dwindling patronage, the pioneering film studio New Theatres shut down in 1955. Sen and Ray are among those who chose to stay back in Calcutta and make sense of the city through their cinema.
Sen began his journey as a film director in 1956 with Raat Bhore, a journey of four and a half decades that would include 27 feature films, 14 shorts, and 4 documentaries. While he made six feature films in Hindi, one in Telugu (Oka Oori Katha, 1977), one in Odia (Matira Manisha, 1966), Calcutta and Bengali remained the centre of his imagination, even as he garnered more attention in film festivals, becoming the first Indian to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival jury, serving in 1982.
Broadly, Sen’s filmography has been theorised into three parts, each washing over one another, neither distinct nor watertight — the first coming out of India’s independence when we became a post-colonial nation; the second coming out of the tectonic shifts taking place in Calcutta in the late 1960s-early 1970s with Naxalbari; the third is the internationalism that came out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, trying to examine the moral fumblings of people living in the shadow of bhadralok capitalism.
It was only in his third film Baishey Shravan (22nd Day Of Shravan, 1960) that Sen’s artistry, politics, and political artistry was seen in clear focus. The film begins in the late 1930s and tapers into the years of World War II, with the Bengal famine in the background. While the famine is never shown, what unfolds on screen is the resulting slow disintegration of a couple, an old man and a young girl, till the girl dies by suicide. Here is poverty shown as grotesque, alienating as opposed to the more romanticised version in Ray’s films, which were exhibiting to critical and commercial acclaim at home and abroad. Sen, in a 1976 with Udayan Gupta noted, “We have always been trying to make poverty respectable, and dignified… You can find plenty of this in Bengali literature. As long as you present poverty as something dignified, the establishment will not be disturbed.” To disturb the establishment — Sen articulated one of the crucial tenets of his cinema; one that would be tested, twisted, and tamed over the coming decades.
The Poetics of Interruption
While that is a thematic tenet, there is also Sen’s use of aesthetics — what some might argue is his abuse of aesthetics — which has come to be associated with the auteur. The freeze-frame, where a single frame from the film stock is “frozen”, pausing the fluidity of video, by printing multiple copies of the same frame, making it feel like a photograph, along with the puncture of actual photographs is one such stylistic punch — a citric addition that yanks you out of the film. Used first in Alfred Hitchcock’s Champagne (1928) and popularised by François Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959), the freeze frame bled its way into Indian cinema through a cut that Sen made. Literary critic Torsa Ghosal calls this Sen’s “poetics of interruption”.
Sen’s persistent obsession with photographic freeze begins with Akash Kusum (1965). These interruptions exert a dual, almost contradictory force over the film. A photo of a character holding the Canon film camera; the lovers, played by Soumitra Chatterjee and Aparna Sen, posing for one another; then a photo of this photo being taken — with both the photographer and the photographed in frame — allows both a deepening of the moment by freezing it, and a rupturing of it by making its staged quality apparent. A photo of the two lovers sitting in a park, pensive, looks like a behind-the-scenes shot. This is a moment where actors are resting, keeping their characters aside for a moment. Cinema is laid bare even as its beauty is contained.