Calcutta ’71 (1972)
Director: Mrinal Sen; Writer: Mrinal Sen; Producer: D.S. Sultania; Cinematographer: K.K. Mahajan; Editor: Gangadhar Naskar; Cast: Ranjit Mullick, Utpal Dutt, Geeta Sen, Madhabi Mukherjee, Sandhya Roy Choudhury, Satya Bannerjee, Snigdha Majumdar, Ajitesh Bannerjee, Debraj Ray, Robi Ghosh, Raju, Suhasini Mulay, Binota Roy, Rudraprasad Sengupta
Duration: 01:26:30; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 60.412; Saturation: 0.011; Lightness: 0.340; Volume: 0.181; Cuts per Minute: 13.282; Words per Minute: 63.380
Summary: Sen set out the aims of his 2nd film in the Calcutta trilogy (Interview, 1970; Padatik, 1973): ‘As long as you present poverty as something dignified, the establishment will not be disturbed. We wanted to define history and put poverty in its right perspective.’ Extending his anti-naturalist approach in order to explore more freely and with greater complexity the way history shapes the texture of people’s lives, the film recounts three famous Bengali stories by three Bengali authors together with two contemporary episodes, each presenting an aspect of poverty and exploitation: an angry young man (Mullick) on trial in 1971, a rainstorm in a slum in 1933, a lower-middle-class family during the 1943 famine, teenage smugglers in 1953 and, back again in 1971, a middle-class group in a posh hotel. The events are linked by an imaginary figure who, by 1971, has gained an insight into the dynamics of history and urges action for change. Often described as ‘propagandistic’, the film is more didactic in the Brechtian sense, encouraging audiences to learn from the representations rather than telling people what to think. The film became a major cultural rallying point for student radicals, its screenings at the Metro Theatre in Chowringhee, Calcutta, being placed constantly under police surveillance.
Release date: 12 October, 1972 (Metro)
Painting by Suvaprasanna for the film
Source: ‘Always Being Born: Mrinal Sen, A Memoir’, Stellar Publishers Pvt Ltd., 2004
Calcutta 71, the second film in the trilogy, is also the one that marks a definitive shift in tone and treatment from Sen's earlier films. While 'Akash Kusum', 'Bhuvan Shome' and 'Interview' had used sharp satire and dark humour to foreground their critique or their ideologies, 'Calcutta 71' adopts a stark and relentless realism in the depiction of poverty and exploitation which would become a feature of Sen's cinematic sensibilities in that decade. At the same time, one must maintain that the dominant leitmotif of 'Calcutta 71' is unmitigated anger - not the flash of anger that had marked the Quixotic end of 'Interview' but congealed anger at the systematic violence and deprivation that marks civilization. The hyperbolic lines of the a twenty year old, (twenty, Sen has admitted, is an age he associated symbolically with youth, a necessary association given the frenzy and energy that is infused in the motif of the twenty-year old youth) who has been walking in the midst of this exploitation and violence for well over a thousand years, frame each and every episode of the film, foregrounding the generational nature of this exploitation that has engendered only poverty and death. Each episode of this film is a study of this generational violence and exploitation, all coming to a crescendo in the political turmoil of the early 1970s. Consequently, cinematically, Calcutta 71 is perhaps the closest that Sen comes to a citation of the many aspects of 'Third Cinema' as espoused by Argentine film-makers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino.
FTII strike assembly
Solanas and Getino had evoked the notion of a third cinema as a political film movement that decries neocolonialism and capitalist exploitation in the context of Latin America, and with Hollywood serving as the aesthetic and cultural machine that propagates this in the everyday. Sen, an admirer of Solanas's work, has often acknowledged his adoption of the cinematic and thematic tropes of third cinema. The film opens with the city yet again, the site of neocolonialism, and is succeeded by rapidly cut images of consumerism, urban life and plenitude alongside starkly contrasting images of exploitation, poverty and death - reminiscent of similar scenes in Solanas's iconic film 'The Hour of the Furnaces'(1968). These citational moves, decrying the notion of the individual auteur (something that had come to be associated with the cinema of Satyajit Ray, for example), ties Sen's sensibilities to an axis of suffering and artistic dissent across the globe - in Africa, Latin America, etc. - as was one of the chief features of the third cinema movement. It reaches a crescendo in the news that is heard over the radio, of the death of the young man who is the narrator and also the political consciousness that frames the film. With the Naxalbari movement at its most sensitive point, it forms a context of the anger and the call for revolution that seeps every frame of 'Calcutta 71'.
FTII strike assembly
Here it must be mentioned that this copy, as it was presented at the Venice Film Festival, does not have the brief opening sequence of court-room. The court-room sequence, in a direct reference to 'Interview', had been of the trial of Ranjit Mullick from the previous film for having vandalized the mannequin. An unabashedly satirical sequence, it continued Sen's use of citation from his own oeuvre while sustaining the critique of neo-colonialism that he had posited in 'Interview'. However, much of the critical opinion on the film has systematically disavowed the effectiveness of this sequence, especially given the relentlessly harsh nature of the three episodes that follow. The missing sequence apparently set the tone of anger, and the social acknowledgement of it, that frames the rest of the film.
The first episode, based on a short story by Manik Bandyopadhyay (the pettiness and wretchedness of existence, especially in the context of Bengal's rural life, had been one of the many defining motifs in Manik Bandyopadhay's literary career - one of the leading lights of modern Bengali literature and author of some of the most remarkable short stories in the past hundred years), is set in a chawl or a basti in Bengal of 1933. A threadbare narrative, the episode is ostensibly about one thing - relentless, unforgiving rain. Bolstered by K. K. Mahajan's cinematography and Banshi Chandragupta's art-direction, the episode foregrounds a sense of timelessness to poverty and suffering that is essential to what the film claims to wish to unearth - a history of poverty, suffering and exploitation. The rain serves as the symbol of the mundane and relentless nature of this oppressive history, the recurrent shots of the relentless monotonous rain acting as a counterpoint to the constant bickering of the family at the centre of it all. Their suffering, the ways in which they attempt to come to terms with it, the hapless humour at the din the rain makes, the parallel shots of rain falling on the floor or in the gathered pots and pans of the dilapidated hut, all have a sense of repetition to it - a suggestion of having gotten used to deprivation and misfortune. This is further foregrounded by the father's matter-of-fact acceptance that the rain might cause pneumonia but it will not manage to kill them.
In fact, the bickering and the barely concealed violence and hostility within the members of the family is an expression of this history of misfortune. The cynicism, the bitterness and the hostility bubbling under the surface (the father wishing to wake up the infant son because he is sleeping peacefully; his suggestion that they stand if they are bored of sitting and getting wet; his refusal to let them seek shelter at the local rich man's house because of his pride; the girl getting impatient with the bickering and insulting the mother; the father driving away the dog in a fit of violence) is counteracted by haplessness and amazement (he rubs the rain-water on himself almost like a balm; the almost musical nature of the rain relentlessly beating down on the hut and on the metal pots and pans).
1933
music
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The first of three stories in the film, this one set in a rainstorm in 1933, and its subsequent social breakdowns.
In the end, what they embark on is a sort of exodus, through the rain and the narrow decrepit lanes, they walk in a single file to the rich man's courtyard - the father having changed his mind and swallowed his pride in the face of overwhelming odds. The journey is marked by long takes of their disembodied feet, a narrow crowding frame as they huddle and walk, and the wider frames of the cataclysmic rain that is seemingly threatening to consume their entire world. Their self-lacerations, much of it borne of their abject conditions and their shattered pride, give way to disbelief and then relief as they become part of the multitude of other destitute, human and animal. What remains constant throughout is the sense of shame attached to the need to seek shelter; an expression of the need to preserve appearances that would become part and parcel of the Bengali middle class's moral economy. The first episode establishes the context for unearthing the history that Sen has set out to explore in the film - a shared history of poverty. It does so in a rather general framework which then sets the stage for the second episode set ten years later.
About the recurrence of the lines with which the film began at the end of each episode, Sen has remarked: "A young man of 20’ as he walks through history for one thousand years or more and drops into the intolerance of 1971, is a political concept...Physical look of hunger is the same throughout ages, it is the mind that changes. This is what I wanted to capture through the eternally 20-year old; the changing mood, from cold acceptance to cynicism, bitterness, and then to anger. The only conclusion I could arrive at was so eloquently spelled out by Steinbeck : ‘The line between hunger and anger is a thin line……’." [Mrinal Sen’s interview by Sumit Mitra, from ‘Views on Cinema’, Ishan Publications, Calcutta, 1977]
The second episode opens with a shot from Sen's 1960 film 'Baishey Shraban', set during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. Much like Ghatak and his evocation of the memories of partition as one of the cataclysmic events that define his oeuvre, the 1943 Famine spoke directly to some of the aesthetic and political concerns that dominated Mrinal Sen's cinematic sensibilities. This is evident in his repeated return to the Famine, right from 'Baishey Shraban' in the beginning to a much later film like 'Akaler Sandhane'. Sen has himself variously stated his concerns and preoccupations with the 1943 famine. The single shot of Gyanesh Mukherjee from the earlier film, firmly outlines the framework within which the second episode of the film works.
This is further foregrounded by the figure of the female star who is the protagonist in this episode. Madhabi Mukherjee had previously come to be noticed in her role in 'Baishe Shraban' nearly a decade earlier. Her return to working with Sen in another film which takes a different vanatge point for exploring the horrors of the Famine asserts the multiple connotations of the Famine as both a theme and a recurrent trope in Sen's cinema.
The second episode is based on a short story by Prabodh Sanyal (who, among others, was also a part of the Kallol group of writers, perhaps the first conscious literary movement to embrace modernism in Bengali literature). Set in Calcutta during the 1943 Famine it looks at the effects of the Famine in various ways on the middle class from a point of view diametrically opposite to 'Baishe Shraban' which had looked at the rural aspect. Much like before, Sen never entirely shows the Famine, instead lingering on suggestions, stray photographic stills, and effects to deepen the sense of loss, hopelessness and dread (one iconic image being that of a crowd of starving people rishing at the news of 'phyan' being distributed; 'phyan' being the starch mixed with liquid that needs to be drained out when cooking rice. The image of hungry, destitute people screaming for even 'phyan' is one of the most indelible images of the Bengal Famine in the Bengali literary and cultural canon). The same is true for the mess where the family stays; most of narrative works through suggestions and insinuations without ever spelling out the reality until the explosive confrontation at the end.
Binota Roy who plays the mother is perhaps best remembered for Bimal Roy's remarkable first film 'Udayer Pathe' (1944) which, despite being made under the aegis of the New Theatres Ltd., anticipated many of the thematic and ideological concerns of the IPTA. A staunchly Marxist critique of class, privileges, labour rights and family, 'Udayer Pathe' is one of the early examples of the sort of cinematic representation of a vibrant political sensibility that Mrinal Sen showcases in his 1970s films.
The second episode too is marked by a similar sort of tension, bitterness and bickering within the family that one had seen in the first episode. However, two things are noticeable. Unlike the general nature of the picture in the previous episode, the second one works on a constant undercurrent of some immense secret that everyone is trying desperately to hide, making it a more specific, and hence intense. This mimics the critique that Sen lays out here: the Bengali middle class's devotion to maintaining forms and appearances even in the face of abject adversity. The family - emblematic of any middle class family in jeopardy - has resorted to prostitution and petty crimes for survival and yet the mother is desperate to keep the charade of respectability going; this notion of respectability being one of the central tenets of the middle class's moral economy. When the charade comes apart at the seams it lets lose a volley of accusations and an ugly confrontation, threatening to further destabilize the fragile respectability the older woman has been trying to cling to. The eldest daughter's defiant confrontation with the mother signals the gradual deepening of anger.
The bitter confrontation between the mother and the eldest daughter, the resolute acceptance in the daughter over the changed scenario of their mode of sustenance, the relative's quick withdrawal on learning the truth, everything paves the way for a sort of defiant anger at the nature of the calamity - the Famine was something that was entirely manufactured as a means of repression and control. The unflinching look at the repercussions of such an event foregrounds what Sen has called the 'dialectics of poverty'. Poverty has irrevocably changed the matrix of the middle class, and indeed will continue to do so in the decades to come.
Sen has remarked in this context: "We have always being trying to make poverty respectable and dignified. This has been a tradition which has been handed down to us from generation to generation. You can find plenty of this in Bengali literature. As long as you present poverty as something dignified, the establishment will not be disturbed. The establishment will not act adversely as long as you describe poverty as something holy, something divine. What we wanted to do in Calcutta 71 was to define history, put it in its right perspective. We picked out the most vital aspect of our history and tried to show the physical side of hunger as well. Over time, the physical look of hunger is the same. But there is a marked change in the people – their perception changes. In a way I call this the dialectics of hunger, the dialectics of poverty." [‘Interview: 1971’, Interviewed by Udayan Gupta, originally appeared as ‘Introducing Mrinal Sen’ in Jump Cut, 1971, (From, ‘Montage – Mrinal Sen: Life, Politics, Cinema’, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2002)]
The third episode continues to explore the forms and limits of the middle class's preoccupations with appearances and the petit-bourgeois cultural and moral hegemony; however, unlike the previous two it takes an entirely different vantage point. Set in 1953, and based on a short story by Samaresh Basu (the choice of author is significant as Basu had been a chronicler of Bengal's suburban lives, especially after 1947, and the changing social and sexual mores in a urban and semi-urban context; two of his novels, 'Bibar' and 'Prajapati', had been briefly banned on charges of obscenity), the episode follows a new class that has emerged out of the middle-class. The rice-smugglers, emblematic of the food crisis that hit the new-born nation in the early 50s, are pitted directly against the respectable middle-class men who are travelling in the train compartment with them. The object of critique is the same: the middle-class's hypocrisy and their obsession with maintaining appearances. However, the critique does not come from within the middle-class anymore but from outside, from the lower-classes and the rural poor. Consequently, the tone of the criticism is decidedly more vitriolic, the barbs sharper and satirical. The young boys, their so-called acts of transgression (smoking, their innuendo-laden songs and conversations, the loudness and lewdness they exude that makes their co-passengers uncomfortable, the clearly illegal nature of their vocation, the fact that they are earners in their families pitted against the foppish older men in the train), provide a very different intervention in the history of poverty and exploitation - an intervention marked by resentment and anger beginning to find external manifestation. Especially significant because it occurs purportedly outside the purview of colonialism, the conflict of classes and the questions raised regarding taste, morality and rights are precursors to the violent self-expression that the film began with and which it will return to in the 1970s.
The notion of a social 'problem' that these classes of people constantly foreground is in direct contrast to middle class ways of living, thinking and enduring. In fact, the 'problem' as the man seems to explain is more cultural than anything else, and how the middle class's cultural expressions are seemingly threatened by this vibrant and intrusive counter-current. The violence that erupts is thus as much corrective as it is a means of asserting cultural and moral superiority. Consequently, unlike the previous two episodes, the violence is returned to its source when the boy trips the man while the latter is disembarking. If anger is one of the central driving forces behind the sequences that make up 'Calcutta 71', then in the 1953 episode this anger rises to the surface, threatening to spill over and spark a rebellion. The end is deliberately open-ended, one does not know what happens to the boy (in one supposed missing shot, the boy's family goes to sleep with a place between them left empty, hoping for his return); and it is this lack of knowledge about anger and its after-effects that lead one to the climactic decade of the 70s when it explodes on the body social.
The final sequence, the upper-class party, in many ways ties up the tale of poverty, exploitation and anger that the previous episodes have been attempting to foreground; the setting, that of a lavish party full of the most famous people from society, is perfect for the critique of class and neo-colonialism that the film has been building up to. This segment is also one that is the most ideologically and technically close to Solanas's unrelenting critique of neo-liberalism and the bourgeoise oligarchy that sits at the head of the body social. Written by Ajitesh Banerjee who also plays the emblematic bourgeois figure in the film, it is also the segment that is considered the most uneven. The reason is not too difficult to fathom. The episode is relentlessly blunt, the metaphors obvious and direct, and the gradual descent to frenzy (the frenzied music, the rapid cuts, the parallel shots of suffering, persecution and violence that are reminiscent of similar scenes from 'The Hour of the Furnaces' where neo-liberal excesses are placed alongside scenes from a slaughter-house) approaches the sort of artistic propaganda that Sen never shied away from. The references to the Famine (the painting on the wall that Ajitesh Banerjee's character uses to 'test' the moral compasses of those around him; parallel cuts of the famine and the millions who died of starvation) sustain the thematic burden of the earlier episodes while highlighting the hypocrisy and frivolity of the upper and middle classes (the same character was in fact a black marketeer during the Famine and the War). Besides the history of poverty, another order is added to the critique, that of hunger.
The excesses, and frivolity of the upper classes then paves the way for the eruption of protests and revolt - a direct reference to the political turmoil of the time and the Naxalbari movement. The texts that appear on screen, 'election', 'vote', 'unemployment', 'hunger', moral degeneration', 'betrayal by the ancestors', the images of the suckling calf, the symbols of the political parties standing in for their vote-bank politics, all these are defiantly accusatory; the political nature of the theme having come to the forefront unlike ever previously in Bengali cinema. The sort of imagery and aesthetic that was deemed propagandist at the time, which also explains the lack of appeal of this episode; Sen himself has never shied away from the charge. At the height of this excess, then, there is a symbolic black-out, a silencing of repressive excess and an eruption of revolt.
The final sequence brings this exploration of a history of deprivation and poverty to a climactic point in the context of the political violence that wracked Calcutta in the early 1970s. The young man whose voice had narrated this history appears for the first time, as he breaks the fourth wall, in a manner reminiscent of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed, and directly addresses the audience. He is a spectre, both literally and figuratively - he has been killed that morning in a fake encounter by the police (a common occurence during the Naxalite rebellion) and he is also the dying consciousness of the class which is the subject of Sen's unwavering critique. He addresses the audience, and on the back of the three stark episodes he has narrated, he accuses the middle-class of the complacency that has resulted in the political situation of the time. The young man, the rebel, would henceforth become a recurrent image in Sen's films of the time, appearing in the very next film 'Padatik'.
calcutta trilogy
calcutta71 rochona
A mural by the artist Suvaprasanna, depicting the Sen nature of oppression that is Sen's focus here. This is accompanied by images from the three episodes, newsreel footage of strikes and agitations, scenes of the Famine of 1943, and shots of police-men poised to shoot young rebels, everything framed by the young man talking about his journey through history. He has been passing through death and squalor and poverty, and for the past thousand years or more he has bridged despair and frustration. For him the history of India is a continuous history, not of synthesis but of poverty and exploitation. The sequence is built of images and technical innovations that mark both the artistic and political lineages that define Sen's aesthetics. Reminiscent of the narrative interruptions and innovations of the French New Wave, the virulently political statements of Solanas, the Brazilian Cinema Novo and its ideologue Glauber Rocha, and the anti-imperialist radical left movements of Latin America, Mrinal Sen's twenty year-old visionary calls for change, a revolution, a violent one if need be.
The scene combines various elements from various sources: IPTA folk performances, Bertold Brecht's epic theatre, documentary footage Sen had been shooting for sometime of the Naxalite uprising, newsreel footage of strikes and protests. All this frames the iconic Naxalite image of the lone young rebel, being chased and shot dead by the State's forces. The film became a major cultural rallying point for student radicals, its screenings at the Metro Theatre in Chowringhee, Calcutta, being placed constantly under police surveillance. Mrinal Sen has talked about multiple instances when people had come up to him, both threateningly or with gratitude, on identifying some loved person in the many newsreel images in the film of student rebels and other people who had been killed in fake encounters during Naxalbari.
Sen remarks about the historical moment: "I made Calcutta 71 when Calcutta was passing through a terrible time. People were getting killed every day. The most militant faction of the Communist Party, the Naxalites, had rejected all forms of parliamentary politics. At the same time they had a host of differences with the other two Communist Party factions. This in turn led to many inter-party clashes and invariably all of them ignored the main issue of mobilizing forces against the vested interests – the establishment...I wanted to interpret the restlessness, the turbulence of the period that was 1971 and what it is due to. I wanted to have a genesis. The anger had not suddenly fallen out of anywhere. It must have a beginning and an end. I wanted to try to find this genesis and in the process redefine our history. And in my mind this was extremely political." [‘Interview: 1971’, Interviewed by Udayan Gupta, originally appeared as ‘Introducing Mrinal Sen’ in Jump Cut, 1971, (From, ‘Montage – Mrinal Sen: Life, Politics, Cinema’, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2002)]
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