Director: Shyam Benegal; Writer: Shama Zaidi; Producer: Shyam Benegal; Cinematographer: Ashok Mehta; Editor: Bhanudas Divakar; Cast: Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Neena Gupta, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, K.K. Raina, Annu Kapoor, Harish Patel, Mohan Agashe, Ila Arun, Anita Kanwar, Pankaj Kapoor, Jayant Kripalani, Satish Kaushik, Meenal Patel, Ravi Jhankal, Dhruv Ghanekar, Jairup Jain, Aslam Farshuri, Sitaram Parsa, Raj Narasimha Rao, Raghu Chandra Parsa, Sharat Chandra Parsa, Frederic El Guedj, Pallavi Joshi
Duration: 02:06:20; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 140.337; Saturation: 0.060; Lightness: 0.330; Volume: 0.230; Cuts per Minute: 5.651
Summary: A tribute to the ‘Ikat’ handloom weavers of
Pochampally in AP. The film tells of Ramulu
(Puri), a master of silk weaving, his family and
their tribulations with the co-operative they
work in. The drama is sparked off by internal
rivalries and the arrival of a government
official, a woman (Gupta) looking for items to
send to an exhibition in Paris. Complications
are provided by Ramulu, who secretly uses
some of his allotted silk to make a wedding sari
for his daughter, leading to his temporary
disgrace. The contrast between artisanal
craftsmanship and mass-production techniques
is illustrated by the life of Ramulu’s son-in-law,
who moves away from the family and finds
work in a textile factory. The moral of the story
is underlined in an interview between a French
journalist and Ramulu, the latter trying to
explain that a craftsman pours the essence of
his soul into his craft. Unlike e.g. Mani Kaul
(cf. Mati Manas, 1984) whose 80s work is also
animated by similar concerns for dying craft
traditions, Benegal’s cinema makes no effort to
mediate, demystify or even understand the
nature of that ‘essence’. Produced, like his
earlier Manthan (1976), by a marketing cooperative,
the film also capitalised on a
specifically 80s orientalism brought about by
the several Festivals of India and trade fairs of
traditional craft in Europe and the USSR.
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