Dibyendu's WallScript

I had asked him only a single question—because I had the fortune of speaking with him only once. With Subrata Mitra, the greatest cinematographer India has ever produced.   His tall frame, his calm face framed by a halo of white hair, evoked wonder again and again. I kept thinking—these were the very eyes that first witnessed the world-famous images on celluloid. This was the man who, if he disagreed, never spared even Satyajit Ray or James Ivory.   There was a time when I was seized with the feverish urge to learn the philosophy of the cinematic camera. In that fever, I found myself seated, spellbound, as his student at the Film and Television Institute of India, in a cinematography class once conducted by Satyajit Ray. To sit in the presence of the god of cinematography, to swallow his words with open-mouthed reverence.   And then, after class, to nervously hurl one timid question, my heart pounding like a drum. Who knew that this would turn out to be the hardest questi...

The malicious tribe of film critics has discovered a curious similarity between Sooraj Barjatya and Mira Nair. One is said to prefer throwing a Pathani coat over his kurta–pajama, the other over her salwar–kameez. A grey-bearded critic of ill repute went further, remarking that both Nair and Barjatya share a fondness for the same noisy destination: the boisterous wedding party, where liquor flows and licentiousness bursts forth like a fountain.   I once heard that when news of his Nobel Prize arrived, the English poet (a second-rank one!) W. B. Yeats rode out in a horse carriage with half a dozen rowdy lads to make merry on the streets of London. In his hand he carried a megaphone of the old variety, through which he loudly beat his own drum. In similar fashion, when she received the “Venice Nobel(!),” the (third-rank) director Mira Nair staged a baraat on Delhi’s Rajpath. Her girlishly delighted face splashed across every channel of “Ha Bhookh TV.” And suddenly, she claimed that s...

The “jump cut” is, in truth, a cinematic device invented by the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Our Indian connoisseurs of cinema have never really studied this device with any depth. Yet, even without knowing it, the name has lodged in memory, repeated from ear to ear. When one hears the phrase jump cut, the feeling evoked is not so much one of gravity, but rather of a sudden, playful lightness. No wonder the wise critics often call Godard a loquacious filmmaker!   And yet, in our everyday lives, such jump cuts keep occurring relentlessly. That day, I was traveling by train from a suburban outpost in South Kolkata to Sealdah. As I passed through the narrow lane of platform number fourteen, a flood of nearly a quarter-thousand passengers poured out in a rush from a Lakshmikantapur train. Pressed by the crowd, the multitude advanced one step forward, two steps back.   In front of me walked a middle-aged, solemn man, clad in the old-fashioned style of dhoti and panjabi. He bel...