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The master of marquee

Shobha Sengupta

Having been deputy director in the Directorate of Film Festivals and managing director of the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), besides knowing Mrinal Sen and his family from close quarters since 1970, Dipankar Mukhopadhyay is the man perhaps best equipped to write a book on the great director. Mr Mukhopadhyay has also to his credit Kathapurush, a book in Bengali, based on his conversations with Mrinal Sen. Mr Mukhopadhyay has studied the cinema of Mrinal Sen (now 86) minutely over the years. It is this study of Mrinal Sen’s films which unfortunately overshadows the man (who has apparently never kept a diary) and it is the minutiae which overwhelms, and crowds the book.

Mrinal Sen’s cinematography and his chosen themes are explored in such detail that the man is lost to us. Mr Mukhopadhyay has not been able to dissect the man behind the filmmaker, and more or less carries on an academic detailed discussion of his work. Often, less is more, but Mr Mukhopadhyay does not seem to believe in the dictum.

Originally published 15 years ago as The Maverick Maestro, the book appears in a revised and updated form. Tellingly subtitled "Sixty Years in Search of Cinema", the book deals with the craft and the politics involved in his cinema. Mrinal Sen appears to be a somewhat linear persona. The style lacks verve and pace, and stilted at times. An example: "Mrinal Sen... now lives all alone in a huge flat, with only his ailing wife for company." The man lives all alone (!) with "only" his wife for company. What or who else does he need for company in his apartment? It is the Appendix "Quite A Few Things about Myself", a paper read by Mrinal Sen at the National Institute of Advanced Studies at Bengaluru in 1994 himself which is perhaps one of the most absorbing parts in the book. The interaction between Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen is another highlight, with Ray the man coming across as petty in comparison, even if Ray is the greater filmmaker.

Mrinal Sen, born in 1923 in Faridpur, now in Bangladesh, was one of 12 children. The description of his childhood, his high school years, the relationship between him and his parents, what they were like, is well-written. Mrinal Sen came to Calcutta to study physics. During his student days he got involved with the cultural wing of the Communist Party. Interestingly, he never became a card-carrying member of the party, being too independent in thought. Mrinal Sen was far more interested in the grey areas of human nature, and never saw things in black and white. His association with the Indian People’s Theatre Association was long-lasting. Stumbling upon a book on aesthetics, he became interested in cinema but was forced to take up the job of a medical representative, which took him to the interiors of Bengal. He eventually took up a job as a audio technician in a Kolkata film studio, and the rest was to become history.

In 1953, Mrinal Sen made his first film, which he tried to erase from both his and public memory. His second film Neel Aakasher Nichey brought him some recognition. It was his third film Baishey Shravan which gave him international exposure. After making several more films, it was Bhuvan Shome — made on a shoestring budget —which earned him the status of a great filmmaker of international standing. Details like Mrinal Sen shooting flood scenes from newspaper photographs, and using newspaper headlines, give the book some brownie points. His next few films were overtly political and earned him the reputation of being a Marxist, but it was in his films on the bourgeois middle class society that he found his true medium and expression. Always experimenting and improvising, he interestingly never worked with a ready script.

Mrinal Sen is hugely informative about his films. However, any reader of this book would, one presumes, have seen several of his films, but unlikely to have seen them all. In such a scenario, the book tends to become incomprehensible in parts. Cinema is at the end of it, an audio-visual medium, and has to be seen to be experienced. The nuances of a scene cannot be read about. The book will have limited appeal for the lay reader, who has picked up the book after having watched Bhuvan Shome, Mrigaya and Ek Din Pratidin. Even an ardent admirer will find the book a bit of a plod. A biography must explore the man and his mind, rather than just his work. It seems that Mrinal Sen has had no life outside of his work and his small family. The politics and his social milieu play an important role in the book, but the intrinsic complexity of the man is unexplored and the depth of his personality hardly been plumbed.

Shobha Sengupta owns and runs Quill and Canvas, a bookstore-cum-art gallery in Gurgaon