Introduction
On 5 October 1947, a small group of artists, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and clerical workers got together in Calcutta with the express purpose of forming a film society modelled on the cine clubs in Paris in order to promote the exhibition of and discussion on ‘good’ cinema among cineastes in the city. Their aim was not only to emulate the Parisian clubs in their conversations about films, they also wanted to launch a journal that would feature well-researched articles on international cinema and contemporary Indian film culture. In the next decade, many more such film societies developed around India. Six film societies (from Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Patna, and Roorkee) came together in 1959 to propose the creation of a national regulatory body called the Federation of Film Societies, which was established later in the same year. By the 1960s, film societies had spread beyond metropolitan areas to small towns across India. According to a report published in the Indian Film Society News in 1981, from six in 1959 the number of film societies grew to 23 in 1964, 111 in 1971, 169 in 1978, to 216 in 1981. By 1981, there were over 100,000 film society members across the country.Footnote 1
In what follows, I offer a brief history of the film society movement, confined though it was to those who considered themselves film aficionados. Cineastes in India and abroad are familiar with the works of Indian film directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Basu Chatterjee, G. Aravindan, Kumar Shahani, Adoor Gopalkrishnan, and Mrinal Sen. What is less well known is that all of them were associated in some way with the film society movement.Footnote 2 This, however, is not the only reason why a history of the film society movement is of interest to students of South Asia. The movement, particularly during the three decades or so when it flourished, came to be marked by debates about the cultural and political role of cinema that were reminiscent of controversies generated previously over literature and theatre in the work of the Progressive Writers Association, founded in 1936, and the Indian People's Theatre Association, founded in 1942. This connection between the concerns of film societies and those articulated by the Indian People's Theatre Association or Progressive Writers Association were not accidental.
Actors and directors such as Utpal Dutt, Bijon Bhattacharya, Nemai Ghosh, and Ritwik Ghatak came into film societies after considerable involvement with the Indian People's Theatre Association. Much more significant for our purposes than such individual associations however, were the ideological overlaps between these earlier groups and the film society movement. Writing about the Progressive Writers Association, Priyamvada Gopal has argued that the ‘idea that a self-critical literature or, more precisely, writing that critically identified an “us” and an “our” in the interests of [social] reconstruction’ was one of the defining features of the Progressive Writers’ movement.Footnote 3 Similarly, as demonstrated below, film society activists struggled with the meaning of what constituted a ‘good’ cinema. Was it something whose foremost commitment was to the uplift of the Indian people, a task in which mainstream ‘commercial’ cinema, driven by profit motives, had failed? Or was it, as an early film society activist put it, to ‘mirror the aspirations of common people’Footnote 4 through the medium of cinema? The film society initiative was not homogenous. Indeed, the first aim of this paper is to demonstrate the tensions and disputes inherent in that project. The second aim is to introduce the film society movement into discussions of postcolonial Indian history to show how civil society organizations related to films in the first three decades after independence. This movement's contribution in thinking about how to reorient cinema from a medium of mass entertainment into an art form for changing social and political consciousness remains undeniable, despite its elitist orientation, finite impact, and internal fissures.
The diverse groups that comprised film societies were agreed on one issue—their critique of mainstream Bombay (and other regional) cinema that they viewed as deluding the masses who flocked to theatres to watch a make-believe world on the silver screen.Footnote 5 This one commonality aside, there was no uniformity in the views of the participants in the film society movement, either in their cinematic tastes or in their interpretations of the cultural tenets of the Indian left.Footnote 6 To do justice to the rich heterogeneity of their views, this paper is organized in a manner that draws attention to two distinct definitions of ‘good cinema’ which emerged over the course of the film society movement. The period 1947 to 1965 may be regarded as the first phase of the movement. During this time film society members were committed to cultivating and promoting good taste in cinema as their contribution to public life. This was fundamentally an aesthetic commitment to watch, understand, and eventually make good cinema in India. My analysis of this period focuses primarily on the institutional history of the movement: who started it and how it spread. Contrary to a long held assumption that film societies flourished in Calcutta alone, a view no doubt fostered by the prominence of Satyajit Ray, this account of the early phase demonstrates that Calcutta's prominence in film society circles was matched in enthusiasm and activity by those in other cities and smaller towns across the country.Footnote 7 Selective details of the films watched by the early societies and the difficulties involved in acquiring films, both foreign and domestic, will also be discussed.
By the mid 1960s, however, there was a shift in emphasis from the aesthetic to a more political engagement with cinema. The second half of this paper focuses on the years 1965 to 1980 in order to track this political turn and the ideological fault lines that developed within the movement as it expanded rapidly. The very fact that many film society activists reviled Satyajit Ray in the 1960s as an aesthete signifies that good cinema was now being redefined as politically engaged. This is also suggested by contemporary commentaries on the works of Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, or Ritwik Ghatak. Film society activists of the later period debated the task of political cinema in a postcolonial society like India. While some supported the notion of a state-sponsored cinema, others remained critical of the radical potential of such a move. But they were all agreed that ‘radical’ cinema should connect with the ‘Indian people’, an expression that featured time and again in their writings.
The sources utilized in this paper cover a wide range of publications by film societies. Many film society periodicals or newsletters folded up after a few volumes while others continued with varying degrees of success. Other sources include reports and surveys published by the Indian Federation of Film Societies, memoirs, and essays by film society members. These documents, in English and other Indian languages housed variously in the National Film Archives in Pune, in individual film societies around the country, and in personal collections of long time film society members, constitute a rich if hitherto under-utilized archive of Indian cinema.
The film society movement: the early years
Despite the fact that most film society activists regard the Calcutta Film Society (1947) as the pioneer of such associations in India, there is evidence of at least two more film societies, both in Bombay, that were in existence before the one in Calcutta came into being. A questionnaire circulated by Indian Film Society News in 1964 to the earliest film societies around the country is a good starting point from which to map the history of the early years. The responses it elicited offer vivid glimpses into the challenges and experiences during the first fifteen years or so of the movement. One of the respondents to Indian Film Society News was the Bombay based Amateur Cine Society of India, established in 1939. According to Deryck Jeffries, who signed off the questionnaire on behalf of the society, it was founded with six members by M. Jepson who was associated with the English daily, The Times of India.Footnote 8 Jeffries noted:
We are mainly interested in making amateur films—but like to see film classics for appreciation so that we can improve our own technique. We believe that you can't make a good film unless you know what the ingredients of a good film are—ergo see good films, appreciate them, then try to emulate their example.Footnote 9
The second film society, also in Bombay, was the Bombay Film Society founded by Ferenc Borko, a Hungarian photographer serving in the Indian army. This society was registered in 1943 under the Societies Registration Act of Bombay. We are told by R. E. Hawkins, who used to be the General Manager of the Oxford University Press, India, and succeeded Borko as chairperson of that society, that a group of nine members would meet about once a month for film screenings at a miniature theatre above the Eros cinema hall in south Bombay. Hawkins noted in his 1981 reminiscences that most of the early records of this film society were destroyed. A remaining extant note from one Rudi von Leyden dated 8 June 1946, stated that the first Indian film screened by the society was N. R. Acharya's Uljhan (1942). In addition to watching film classics from abroad like, In Which We Serve, Citizen Kane, Blithe Spirit, Miracle at Milan and Jean Renoir's The River—a film shot in West Bengal (India)—the Bombay Film Society also watched Indian films like Chetan Anand's Neecha Nagar (1946) soon after its release. Members of these two societies included important documentary filmmakers like Dr P. V. Pathy, Paul Zils, V. M. Vijaykar, and Clement Baptista.Footnote 10 There were similar attempts to promote film appreciation in other parts of the country including Calcutta. ‘Yet these societies’, remarked the film critic Chidananda Dasgupta, ‘were not able to do much more than getting together to see good films or making sporadically inspired attempts to create an infrastructure for the enhancement of film culture. There were too many obstacles in British India to the growth of stable institutions with wide interactions within the country and abroad’.Footnote 11
To what extent the independence of India from British rule had a direct impact on the rise and growth of the film society movement remains unclear, but independence certainly increased governmental involvement in a general societal search for ‘good cinema’. A number of important government officials were involved in promoting the cause of cinema. Among them was Mrs Indira Gandhi, who acted as Vice President of the Federation of Film Societies for India and, in that capacity, helped film societies to obtain permission to exhibit to their members uncensored films imported from abroad.Footnote 12 Likewise, a film inquiry committee appointed by the government of India under cabinet minister S. K. Patil in 1949 made some important recommendations for the promotion of ‘good cinema’ in the country.Footnote 13 Eventually these recommendations led to the founding of such institutions as the Film Institute of India in 1960, later renamed the Film and Television Institute, the Children's Film Institute in 1955, the National Film Archives of India in 1964, as well as funding bodies such as the Film Finance Corporation, later renamed the National Film Development Corporation of India. Although these initiatives created a favourable atmosphere for the growth of ‘art’ or ‘parallel’ cinema in India, they do not explain the impetus behind the film society movement. The latter was largely a product of individual or group cinephilia and their complete dedication to the cinema cause.
This is evident as we read reminiscences by film society activists in places like Calcutta, Delhi, or Patna. As mentioned above, a group consisting of Satyajit Ray who was then an employee at the advertising firm, Hindusthan Thompson Associates, Chidananda Dasgupta, documentary-maker Harisadhan Dasgupta, who had just returned from Hollywood, Hiran Sanyal, a literary personality, and Radha Mohan Bhattacharya, founded the Calcutta Film Society.Footnote 14 Many of these early participants recall the numerous problems they encountered as they searched for a venue to convene their meetings. The threat of eviction from rental property—as most Bengali householders did not yet consider people associated with cinema socially respectable—is frequently mentioned. Ironically, most film society members were not directly involved with the film industry. But hostility towards the society was not only a by-product of social prejudice against cinema, even proprietors of theatres remained sceptical of the endeavour.
‘We were. . .being subjected to a two-pronged attack’, wrote Satyajit Ray recalling the early days of the Calcutta Film Society. ‘One came from the film trade, which spread the word that a group of subversive youngsters was running down Bengali films at meetings and seminars’. The other came from the neighbours in a building where one of the members of the Calcutta Film Society had offered the group his living room to host meetings. The group was unceremoniously thrown out of the premises as the owner of the house felt that ‘film people’ were ‘spoiling the sanctity of his house’.Footnote 15
Ray and his colleagues in the Calcutta Film Society were not the only ones who confronted such behaviour. Vijaya Mulay, the founder of the Patna Film Society and subsequently of the Delhi Film Society offers a similar anecdote. A general prejudice against films and widespread apathy about the diversity of film cultures played a role in the social censure that film societies faced. ‘Aap bioscope mein kaam karengi kya?’ (Are you going to work in the bioscope?), Mulay was asked by her daughter's friend, Bacchi's mother:
Apparently my young daughter Munni . . . had told her friend Bacchi . . . about the meeting of a ‘bioscope company’ in our house the previous evening and had described with a boast as to how Arun-mama [Arun Roy Choudhury, a journalist and a co-worker in the Patna Film Society] had promised to show her lovely films—or bioscopes—as they were called in Patna in those days. This was enough to stir the placidity of our neighbourhood. . .I tried to explain about the newly formed Patna Film Society, but I don't believe I was quite able to explain to my neighbour why some of us took films seriously and wanted to see a better fare than what the local cinemas offered . . . A woman lecturer like me working in a film company was news! But not a film society!Footnote 16
What exactly did the film societies do? Here are two descriptions from a volume published to celebrate 50 years of the Federation of Film Societies of India. The first was written by Chidananda Dasgupta, who was associated with the Calcutta Film Society since its founding years. The second is a summary of the task of film societies, presumably written up by Narahari Rao, the editor of the said volume. In Dasgupta's words,
Film societies. . .by screening, discussing, reading, and writing about good cinema all over the world. . .create a higher level of artistic taste and thus build up a better and bigger audience for good films within the country. By stirring up interest in the creative cinema among cultured people, film societies (much more than even the training institutes) help to bring out new talent. . ..Footnote 17
Dasgupta's remarks clearly exemplify that in the early years the establishment of film societies was geared towards creating good taste in cinema. What constituted good taste? As we shall see, most film societies in India shared the belief that Indian cinema made during the previous 50 years did not connote good taste. Dasgupta's use of such words as ‘creative’ cinema or ‘cultured’ people indicates that film societies in the early years were fired with a sense of cultural superiority and aimed to create ‘value-distinctions’ (in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of the wordFootnote 18) among different kinds of films. Their purpose was twofold: cultivation and dissemination of good taste through films. They would not encourage discussions of films in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, or Malayalam that were watched by thousands of Indians in theatres around the country. Such cinemas they believed produced the image of ‘a synthetic, non-existent society’, that was credible ‘only within the norms of this make-believe world’.Footnote 19 Theirs was instead a search for what they regarded as creative and realist cinema, very different from the products churned out by the Indian film industry. In an article published in the journal Indian Film Culture in 1965, Dasgupta observed that a proper appreciation for cinema came to India only as recently as the 1950s, a good half-century after the medium was first introduced into the country. ‘In India’, he wrote, ‘the film was an importation from the West, a foreign body introduced into a system unprepared to absorb it. Technology had not made a real impact, and the need had not arisen for a distilling of art through science as it were’. This was followed with an even more trenchant judgment on Indian film luminaries as he remarked, ‘Put Dreyer alongside Phalke, or Eisenstein next to Barua, and the result is ludicrous’.
For Dasgupta, it was not until the release of Do Bigha Zameen, Two Acres of Land, Bimal Roy, 1953; and Pather Panchali, Song of the Road, Satyajit Ray, 1955, that ‘a new understanding of the medium dawned on its creators. . .’.Footnote 20 These were no doubt expressions of prejudice against so-called commercial cinema whose importance and depth have been studied at length in the last 15 years by film scholars. But these statements help further our understanding of the milieu that fostered the early film society movement in India.Footnote 21
A film society is a membership club where people can watch private screenings of films which would otherwise not be shown in mainstream cinemas. They are, in some places known as Film Clubs and Cine Clubs, and they usually have an educational aim, introducing new audiences to different audiovisual works through an organized and prepared program [sic] of screenings. They are involved with people who love films.Footnote 22
Thus wrote Narahari Rao in the Introduction to a volume commemorating 50 years of the film society movement in India. His statement speaks of the pedagogical aims of this movement. Similar sentiments were voiced by numerous film society founders from across the country. For example, Satyajit Ray noted that the Calcutta Film Society he helped found was symbolic of ‘shackling ourselves willingly to the task of disseminating film culture amongst the intelligentsia’.Footnote 23 For the renowned director, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, there were ‘two important reasons’ for starting the Chitralekha film society in 1965. He said, ‘One, I wanted to continue watching the best of international movies. Two, I wanted to introduce audiences to a different kind of cinema. And tell them “Look, it is not the song-and-dance kind of cinema alone that is being produced. There are many other kinds of cinema being made in the world.”’Footnote 24 Or take Muriel Wasi's recollections about the 12 or so people who founded the Delhi Film Society in 1956: ‘These founding parents were professionals in other fields: educationists, journalists, businessmen, administrators, diplomats—but their common interest was the cinema and the special thing that cinema could do to criticize life’.Footnote 25 She adds, ‘They screened films often twice a month and attendance was regular and complete. They met with sympathy, without noise or contention’.Footnote 26
Vijaya Mulay's recollections tell us about the kind of films that were routinely screened in theatres in the 1940s and 1950s. ‘The fare offered by the Patna cinemas’, wrote Mulay ‘was solid Hindi films with a few Bengali films thrown in now and then. All these came after a long run in Calcutta’.Footnote 27 As for English films, Mulay reported that they were not popular anyway; cinema owners were forced to lower ticket prices by half. Apparently, it cost Mulay more to hire rickshaws to get to the cinema to watch these films than it did to buy tickets. In the limited range of English films shown in Patna ‘action films such as Tarzan, Fu Manchu series, Beau Geste etc would usually be the cinema owners’ preference’. Occasionally Patna theatres would screen films starring Mae West, Busby Berkeley, and Charlie Chaplin. The atmosphere of the theatres is best captured in Mulay's own words. Audiences watched these films ‘amongst the whirring of fans, half open doors with light seeping in and with children whimpering or back-stage whispering in the back ground’.Footnote 28 Film societies were an attempt to break away from this type of film going. In their own view, it was a move away from treating cinema as entertainment towards seeing films as serious texts of life.
The 1964 Indian Film Society News questionnaire compiled by Anil Srivastava gives us a sense of what early film societies meant by good cinema. We can deduce this by looking at the kind of films the societies screened. The responses suggest that not all films were available to all film societies. Indeed, acquisition of ‘good’ films was one challenge that is mentioned in all the journals, reminiscences, and reports that have survived from the early days of the movement. The film societies in the metropolitan cities, Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi, and eventually in Madras (set up in 1957) saw considerably more films than their counterparts in Roorkee, Patna, Ranchi, Kanpur, Agra, and Jodhpur. The former groups also had a better supply of film-related journals, magazines, and books in their libraries, though here too there are differences in the degree to which film societies prized access to written material. The Calcutta Film Society started its own journal, Chalachitra, in 1948 but failed to bring out more than one issue. Subsequently, when the number of film societies multiplied around the city, Calcutta became home to numerous film society periodicals such as Kino, Chitrapat, Chitrakalpa, Chitrabikshan, Anya Artha, and many others. In comparison, there were two journals that were published by the Anandam film society and Film Forum in Bombay entitled Montage and Close-Up respectively.Footnote 29 In 1964, the Calcutta Film Society had about 300 film-related books in their collection and regularly subscribed to publications such as Sight and Sound, Monthly Film Bulletin, Film Polski, Soviet Film, Film Quarterly, Montage, Movie, and Indian Film Culture.Footnote 30 They also hosted seminars by film-related personalities visiting from abroad like Jean Renoir, Marie Seton, James Quinn, and Jean Gremillion.Footnote 31 While the other metropolitan film societies maintained a collection of books and journals and hosted a few seminars the Calcutta-based film societies outstripped the rest in their academic approach to cinema.
Nothing illustrates this better than the list of films the Calcutta Film Society screened between 1947 and 1965. Though incomplete, the list included Battleship Potemkin, General Line, Ivan the Terrible, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Last Laugh, Metropolis, Le Million, The Italian Straw Hat, The Kid, Kanal, Ashes and Diamonds, The Childhood of Maxim Gorki, My Universities, Les Bas Fonds, Un Carnet Du Bal, Citizen Kane, Long Voyage Home, Stagecoach, Senso, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, The Face, Ugetsu Monogatari, Harp of Burma, Mon Oncle, Jour de Fete, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, Rififi, Le Jour Se leve, le Courbeau, Zero de Conduite, L'Atlante, He Who Must Die.Footnote 32 Looking back, we might argue that the list, though more exhaustive than lists published by other societies, was not systematic. Its eclecticism suggests that members of the Calcutta Film Society were drawn to different currents of European (and some Japanese) cinema, particularly realist, neo-realist, modernist cinemas and some Film Noir. The influence of Soviet and other ‘eastern bloc’ films is also clear from this list, which is not entirely surprising given the government of India's sympathies with the former socialist bloc and the visit to Calcutta of a Russian film delegation in 1951–1952 that included Pudovkin and Chersakov.Footnote 33 According to Keya Ganguly, the Calcutta Film Society's efforts to create a new ‘intelligentsia’ educated in cinematic taste should be seen as ‘shifting the conversation about modern art and culture from its mooring in European thought and experience and re-anchoring it in non-Western texts and realities’. To make this a project that would be ‘a substantive effort at raising consciousness rather than an empty gesture of nativist appropriation’, however, Ray and his colleagues ‘had to educate the Calcutta literati in the various European and Soviet traditions of cinema. . .’. She argues that this was their way to ensure that ‘an alternative tradition express its full force, though it had by no means to be merely parasitic’.Footnote 34
The difficulties in film procurement and the generally precarious lives of the early film societies emerge as the two most important challenges facing the movement in these years. The Calcutta Film Society is again a good case in point. Despite being acknowledged as ‘a true film society of the early period’,Footnote 35 even this leading association folded up within three years of its inception. One reason for this was Satyajit Ray's departure for England in April 1950. But much more crucial was the absence of financial resources and low membership.Footnote 36 Ray himself observed that it was difficult to get more than 25 people to become members of the film society. His colleague Dasgupta noted in the first (and only) issue of Chalachitra that it was a challenge collecting dues from many people who were ostensibly interested in becoming members of the society.Footnote 37 The membership fee in 1950 was eight rupees for three months. It took quite a few years to increase the number of members to a hundred.Footnote 38
Ram Halder, who was instrumental in reviving the Calcutta Film Society, attributed the recruitment problem to another factor: the alleged snobbery of the leaders of the Calcutta Film Society, most notably Chidananda Dasgupta and Satyajit Ray.Footnote 39 While Ray in later years softened his stand, many like Dasgupta were criticized in the 1960s for their reluctance to allow ‘ordinary people’ into the ranks of film societies.
Running a film society required a good deal of effort. Halder, for instance, makes special mention of the critical help extended by two individuals—Ratilal Dave who was a film distributor and Mahendra Gupta, the owner of a cinema hall—in reviving the Calcutta Film Society. Dave allowed the Calcutta Film Society to show films from his stock free of charge; Gupta let the society host screenings in his theatre for a discounted rate of rupees 50 a month.
Now to the question of acquiring films, the other hurdle faced by most societies. While a handful of members were able to attend film festivals abroad, this was not within the reach of the ordinary film society member. India hosted the first international film festival in 1952 and there are many accounts of the excitement produced by the screening of films like Rome Open City, or Bicycle Thieves. For example, Ritiwk Ghatak writes, ‘I am absolutely convinced of the tremendous impact the first International Film Festival had on all of us. . .countless films, a number of people, and a rare occasion for exchange of ideas! We could see excellent films which immediately provoked a long deferred seriousness towards cinema’.Footnote 40 However, the journal Indian Film Culture, notes with despair, that the subsequent film festival of 1961 ‘had no such impact’ while the committees announced for the 1965 festival contained names that filled film society members ‘with horror and foreboding’.Footnote 41 It would not be far-fetched to argue that film festivals sponsored by the government of India were official platforms in which the role of film societies—in film selection, awards, or jury constitution—was limited at best or almost absent.
Outside of film festivals, quite infrequent in the 1950s and 1960s, film society members had to rely upon other sources to watch foreign films. A Madras film society brochure noted ‘The main sources of films are the embassies. . .and the Central Film Library, New Delhi. The supply however is erratic and at times we have either no films or too many together’.Footnote 42 Indeed, some early film societies folded up because of the difficulty in procuring an adequate number of films for exhibition to their members. As reported in the Indian Documentary,
The Bombay Film Society has been unable to present its regular monthly showing to members for the past two months, due to obstacles and delays put before it by the Home department of the Bombay government. Difficulties of exhibition and censorship are one thing; equally discouraging is the difficulty of importing into India, in the first instance, films destined for non-commercial exhibition to small groups scattered throughout the country.Footnote 43
Throughout the 1950s, the government of India upheld the restrictions on distribution and exhibition imposed by the Indian Cinematograph Act of 1918. This meant that no ‘film society, university, school, museum, club, or business concern could show a film without submitting it for censorship’.Footnote 44 In the early 1950s, film exhibitions on consular premises, as well as footage from unfinished films owned by producers, were exempt from censorship. Furthermore, unlike their British or American counterparts, Indian film societies had to pay entertainment taxes during the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 45
By the early 1960s many of these ‘hurdles began to be lowered’.Footnote 46 In 1962, any film recommended by the President of the Federation of Film Societies (Satyajit Ray) was exempted from censorship by the government of India and then exhibited to the member film societies. The Federation was also allowed to import 16 films free of customs duty for non-commercial screening among its members.Footnote 47 By 1965, 70 feature films and a number of short films were brought to India either via direct import or through an exchange with UNESCO. In addition, foreign missions in India, ‘notably those of France, Sweden, Mexico, Japan, West Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, UK, Yugoslavia, [the] USSR, and East Germany’ also co-operated with individual film societies by giving them access to films from their respective countries.Footnote 48 Nevertheless, the ‘flow of films from developing countries’ was
poor despite the Federation's best efforts . . . primarily due to the Federation's financial position of not being able to purchase and import films; the concerned foreign missions not maintaining a film library; and the absence of regular film exchange program[3]s between these countries and India’.Footnote 49
Societies in small towns suffered in particular. As Arun Kaul, one of the founders of the Bombay based Film Forum put it,
it is a matter of some shame that small town societies which need greater help hardly ever get it. There are many films of ‘extraordinary merit’ such as ‘the Swedish, French, New German and Japanese films’ that never reached these smaller outfits. The Federation, he argued, would be failing in its duties if the films it received were viewed only by a ‘few big city societies.’Footnote 50
Even non-mainstream Indian films were difficult to acquire for film societies in smaller cities. Anil Srivastava's recollections serve as a useful reminder of the degree to which individual initiative mattered, not only in forming a film society but also in keeping it running.
August 4, 1959 in a convent school on Idgah Hill in Bhopal, three children were running a broken down film projector salvaged from a junk shop; a girl was winding the film on a spool free-running on a pencil; a boy was keeping a finger on the loop so that a torn sprocket may not cause the projector to chew up the film; and another boy was varying the rheostat to keep the speed of the projector as constant as humanly possible.Footnote 51
This, he noted, was the beginning of the International Film Club in Bhopal. At the time, he was not aware that there already existed film societies in Calcutta, Delhi, and Bombay. He learned about the Apu trilogy, ‘responsible for putting India on the map of world cinema’, four years after the film had released in India.Footnote 52 Ironically, Ray's films, though world renowned, were not easily available in India and Srivastava had to telephone Ray to request a copy of Pather Panchali.
Reminiscences of an early film society activist
Ram Halder's reminiscences Kathakata Kamalalaya O Prashanga Film Society (Kathakata Kamalaya and the Subject of Film Societies) offers a detailed portrait of the difficulties listed above. Halder, who ran a bookstore called Kamalaya in Calcutta, was first associated with a group called the Bengal Film Society after which he became a very active member of the Calcutta Film Society in 1950. In 1960, he left the latter due to a difference of opinion with Chidananda Dasgupta and instead joined the Cine Club of Calcutta.
Halder opens his reminiscences with a statement of his strong reservation against Chidananda Dasgupta's predilection for admitting into the society only those people he considered film aficionados. Apparently, even Dasgupta's wife was denied membership on these grounds! He notes that in the early years Satyajit Ray tacitly supported Dasgupta's decision to play the gatekeeper to the ‘coterie’.Footnote 53 Ray gradually relaxed his stance as it became increasingly clear that membership numbers were important for the sustenance of the society. Halder speculated that his own admission was allowed to ensure a smooth supply of film-related books that were not easily available or were beyond the means of most film society members. In lieu of his dues, he ordered several important books on cinema for Calcutta film society members, namely Eisenstein's Film Sense, Film Form, Pudovkin's Film Technique, Rene Claire's Reflection on Cinema, Ernest Lindgren's The Art of the Film, and the journal of the British Film institute Sight and Sound.Footnote 54
Halder suggests that in addition to watching the classics of world cinema, individual members also tried hard to promote the making of non-mainstream films in India. For example, after Satyajit Ray wrote a screenplay for Ghare Baire (Home and the World), Harisadhan Dasgupta, his colleague in the Calcutta Film Society, purchased the rights to the film. The project was shelved as they failed to find a producer.Footnote 55 Ray then embarked upon the arduous endeavour of making Pather Panchali. Fellow film society colleagues made efforts to raise money once it became known that Ray had borrowed money against his own life insurance policy, sold his wife's jewellery, his own collection of books and records and that all the actors had agreed to make the film without a fee. Eventually the government of West Bengal funded the making of Pather Panchali.
Halder's account abounds with examples of the friendships he forged not just within the Calcutta Film Society but also with other societies around the country. He makes particular mention of the well-known film critic Amita Malik and Punen Ibrahim, both of whom were active in the Delhi film society; Arun Kaul, Nitin Sethi, and Basu Chatterjee, who worked hard to sustain the film society movement in Bombay; Jagat Murari and Satish Bahadur, who helped in founding the movement in Pune and started the Agra Film Society. These groups exchanged ideas on how to overcome bureaucratic red tape.Footnote 56 Likewise, film society members referred each other to jobs. Ritwik Ghatak's appointment as Vice Principal and Professor of Film Direction at the Pune Film Institute was the result of some intervention by Satyajit Ray. Similarly, Halder himself was offered the position of archivist at the Pune film archives, which he declined.Footnote 57
But it was the difficulty in film acquisition that emerges as the single biggest challenge of the early years of the film society movement. Individual beneficence and the hard labour of activists like Halder or Ray enabled the Calcutta Film Society, and later the Cine Club of Calcutta, to watch foreign films. When Marie Seton of the British Film Institute visited India she brought with her a selection of films including Que Viva Mexico (Sergei Eisenstein, 1932), Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957) and Lower Depths (Akira Kurosawa, 1957). Octavio Paz, who was the Mexican ambassador, and of whose friendship Halder writes at some length, gave the Cine Club of Calcutta a copy of Nazarin (Luis Bunuel, 1959).Footnote 58 Halder quotes from a letter he sent to John Kenneth Galbraith, the American ambassador during 1961–1963, when he, along with Ray and a few others, was trying to organize a retrospective of American cinema in Calcutta. ‘You are not the real ambassador of America’, he wrote. ‘These ambassadors [referring to the chosen films] in tin cans do much more effective work for the cause of the States among the cineastes of India’.Footnote 59 The attempt to host a series entitled ‘The Golden Age of Russian Cinema’ in order to make film society members aware of the impact of 1920s–1930s Russian films fell through when the only film that could be acquired from the Russian consulate in Calcutta was Ivan The Terrible, Part II (Sergei Eisenstein, 1946). Particularly invaluable in these early days were special favours from institutions such as the United States Information Service that made their auditorium, projector, and projectionist available for film screenings.
Halder's recollections demonstrate how closely the film society movement in its first phase depended on the support of political leaders and well-placed bureaucrats. The unsuccessful effort to host a Polish film retrospective in Calcutta serves as a good example. The initial plan was to open it up to the public instead of restricting it to film society members in order to raise money. Accordingly, a few members of the Cine Club of Calcutta met with Jagannath Kolay, the minister of information and broadcasting for the government of West Bengal, in his office at the Writer's building. Atulya Ghosh, a senior Congress leader, wrote a letter to the cabinet secretary in New Delhi on behalf of the Cine Club of Calcutta requesting permission for the films to be shown to the public. Despite the intervention by this well-known senior Congress leader, Congress nevertheless denied permission because they were uncensored prints. These facts help us to understand why film societies invited prominent citizens of the city to be their Presidents and Vice-Presidents, even when these individuals knew next to nothing about world cinema. For example, in the early 1960s the president of the Cine Club of Calcutta was an ex-chief justice of the Calcutta High Court, P. B. Chakrabarty, and the vice president was a professor of political science, Nirmal Bhattacharya. Halder reminisces: ‘as neither of them knew much about cinema we often took books to their houses. Afterwards we would meet in Mr. Chakrabarty's chambers. Other members of the executive committee of the Cine Club joined in these discussions’. They included the well-known photographer Sunil Jana, the film-writer Kironmoy Raha, Pramod Lahiri who produced several of Ritwik Ghatak's films, Professor Gurudas Bhattacharya, and Ratilal Dave.Footnote 60
On another occasion, a Mr Pulikan of the Alliance Française in Calcutta helped the Calcutta group acquire a print of Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) when the film was being shipped from Dhaka to Rangoon. Halder recalls that within two days of his conversation with Pulikan the film was screened at the Janata cinema hall. Unfortunately, this particular screening unleashed a regime of police restriction on film societies following an inadvertent remark by the film critic of the Statesman in his review of the film that the copy exhibited was uncensored.Footnote 61
Halder's account remains valuable also for the light it sheds on the ways in which the author remembers the spread of film societies to small towns outside Calcutta as well as in other metropolitan centres.Footnote 62 For example, he recalls the efforts of Basu Chatterjee, who became a renowned director of ‘middle-cinema’ in India, and Nitin Sethi in reviving a fledgling film society in Bombay and renaming it ‘Anandam’ in the early 1960s.Footnote 63 Enthusiasts wishing to start a film society in the small towns often requested guidance from those in metropolitan cities. Thus, in the 1960s in the outskirts of Calcutta, Pramod Lahiri from the Cine Club of Calcutta helped in the formation of clubs in places such as Dum Dum, Burnpur, and Barrackpore. Halder himself went to districts further afield, such as Midnapur, Darjeeling, and Rourkela and to Cuttack in Orissa. Each time, the members from Calcutta would bring a well-known film or series of films (usually classics in world cinema) for their counterparts in these districts.
One might sum up the history of the film society movement in this first phase as follows: Inspite of the unsystematic nature of the corpus they watched, what distinguished the film societies’ approach to cinema from cinema as entertainment lines up with David Bordwell's distinction between film studies as an academic discipline and the ‘more common ways of talking and thinking about films’.Footnote 64 Film society activists did not describe themselves either as ‘fans’ or as ‘academics’. However, analyzing their activities, meetings, and discussions in retrospect offers strong grounds for arguing that they occupied a space akin to both these groups. Long before the birth of film studies as an academic discipline in India, film societies approached films with an academic's commitment for historical analysis and a cinephile and fan's zeal for acquiring and watching films undaunted by the difficulties they faced in procuring them.Footnote 65 Most crucially, they immersed themselves in learning about the particularity of the cinematic medium—‘in. . .understanding. . .the similarities and differences between the cinema and the other arts’. They also firmly believed that ‘without general culture, film culture is impossible. . .In this film appreciation is very different from the appreciation, or the practice of, say music’.Footnote 66
An apocryphal story that Chidananda Dasgupta narrated in one of his essays captures his take on the particularity of the filmic medium:
. . .the late Ustad Fayyaz Khan,. . .one day during the years of World War II,. . .interrupted his singing of Darbari Kannada to ask one of his pupils ‘I hear there is a war on. Who is fighting whom?’ ‘The Germans and the English’, replied the pupil. ‘They were fighting in 1914’, said the Master, ‘and they are still carrying on, that's a long time to fight [!]’. Having made this extraordinary pronouncement the Ustad resumed his singing.Footnote 67
Dasgupta averred that it would have been impossible to make ‘great’ films in ‘such splendid isolation’. Good cinema to the likes of Dasgupta ‘can never be pure abstraction like music because it expresses itself through realistic forms’.Footnote 68 Mrigankasekhar Roy, cited a statement made by Dasgupta in 1961 as defining the film society movement: ‘Add culture to Indian films and you have the film society movement in India’.Footnote 69 Good filmmaking was not possible without an ‘awareness of reality’—a factor that often led film society pioneers to denigrate the products of Indian commercial films, an attitude that in hindsight appears elitist and tinged with personal prejudice.Footnote 70 As argued by Keya Ganguly, for early pioneers like Dasgupta or Ray ‘cultural literacy was a matter of specialization and the stuff of the cultivation of an intelligentsia as opposed to the education of the masses’.Footnote 71
Looking back in 1976, Mrigankasekhar Roy summed up the achievements of the movement in the following manner. Fifteen years ago, he observed, exhibition of films by Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, or Ritwik Ghatak would hardly have attracted any attention but now they drew large audiences. ‘It is undeniable’ he argued, ‘tastes have changed. Good films are in demand. And in bringing about this change the role played by film societies is undeniable’.Footnote 72 Mrigankasekhar Roy was correct in his observation that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most non-mainstream films made by Indian directors sank without a trace. One of the achievements of the movement was in having created a ground for the reception of non-mainstream films. However, it is important to note that Roy wrote his article at a time when there was extraordinary ferment within the ranks of film societies, a fact he elides in his essay. It is to an analysis of these fissures and controversies that I will now turn in my analysis of the second phase of the movement between 1965 and 1980.
The second phase
By 1975—the fiftieth year of the international film society movement—the number of such societies had increased exponentially in India. Estimates vary; some put the tally at around 115 (with a total of 60,000 members) while others claim a number close to 169 by the end of the 1970s.Footnote 73 The expansion in film society membership testified to a rising interest among Indian cineastes about trends in world cinema. In addition, the movement encouraged young Indian directors to make films that broke with the formula set by mainstream Hindi and other regional language cinemas. Yet, through these shifts, the movement as a whole was transformed in significant ways. Before addressing these changes and their implications, it is important to give readers a sense of the political and social context of India during this time. Added to this were certain developments in world cinema. This backdrop provides the discursive space within which to analyze the tumult that churned the movement during these years.
The Nehruvian promise of modernizing India with a strong, socialistic public sector, where government took responsibility for generating wealth and jobs through its control of public works as well as railways, banks, mining and other industries, had begun to falter from the late 1950s.Footnote 74 The declaration of the first National Emergency in 1959 in Kerala where the Communist Party had been elected to power in 1957 marked a break in the longstanding pattern of a single party hegemony in Indian politics. External issues such as border wars with China and Pakistan (in 1962 and 1965 respectively) and internally the huge rise in unemployment, food shortages, and labour problems led to strikes and lockouts in different parts of the country. Together, these events made the period from the mid 1960s onwards a time of acute political instability in India. Mrigankasekhar Roy, whose writings have been referred to above, posited a direct link between these political developments and the film society movement. ‘True’ he wrote, ‘that much of the hope independence generated crashed very soon, but the new Indian cinema that was born with the film society movement took courage in both hands to mirror the shattered hopes on celluloid’.Footnote 75
Three events are especially noteworthy in terms of their impact on the film society movement during 1965–1980. First, the Naxalite agitation (1967–1971), a Maoist popular movement that drew students and peasants together in a violent struggle to overthrow the Indian state. The Naxalite movement did not affect the entire country but was concentrated in the states of West Bengal, Bihar, and northern Andhra Pradesh. But reports of student uprisings, especially from the late 1960s, of defacing and destroying statues of eminent national leaders, bomb throwing in public places, and the brutal suppression of these young protesting masses by the police, captured national imagination.Footnote 76 The suppression of the Naxalite movement was one of the earliest instances of the Indian state unleashing extraordinary violent measures against sections of the citizen body.Footnote 77 By some accounts, 4,000 supporters of the Communist Party of India were killed in police crackdowns. As noted by Sumanta Banerjee, ‘police informers, scabs, professional assassins, and various other sorts of bodyguards of private property stalked around bullying the citizens. . .streets were littered with bodies of young men riddled with bullets’.Footnote 78 It comes as no surprise that many directors—Anant Patwardhan, Gautam Ghose, Utpalendu Chakraborty—who were young activists during the Naxalite movement went on to make films and documentaries about these events. Others like Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Kumar Shahani, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, and Satyajit Ray used the political turmoil of these days as backdrops for their films and to comment on the fragmentation of the Indian Leftist Movement.Footnote 79
The second event of note was the 1971 Bangladesh war, which not only led to a massive influx of refugees but also evoked memories of a not yet distant partition of the country in 1947. As noted by Ashis Rajadhyaksha, the war and its political ripples in India led to a ‘new turn’ in cinema that was ‘explicitly avant-garde’. The ‘making of Mrinal Sen's Calcutta productions, Ritwik Ghatak's last great epics Titash Ekti Nadir Naam (1973) and Jukti Takko aar Gappo (1974), and Mani Kaul's first films’ fall into this category of films.Footnote 80 Looking back on these years Mrinal Sen remarked, ‘And that was a terrible time for Calcutta. . .1970–71. . .I was arrested. There were killings and murders around every other corner. . .It was the worst of times for the country, and yet, the best of times for me to carry out experiments like this’.Footnote 81
Finally, there was the National Emergency declared by Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1975. The impact of the emergency and the draconian political measures leading up to it on commercial Hindi cinema have been documented.Footnote 82 For the body of films that come under the rubric of new/parallel/art cinema, the effects of the emergency were complex. The Film Finance Corporation, set up in 1960, now sought to promote much more aggressively ‘state support of independent cinema’. All of Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani's films, as well as several of Mrinal Sen's, were made with Film Finance Corporation funding. Film society members were divided in their opinion about the radical potential of an avant-garde cinema funded by the state.Footnote 83
The impact of these domestic political events was reinforced by certain important trends in world cinema. It is now argued that the Third Cinema manifesto ‘appeared foundationally in conversation with a post[-]May 1968 avant-garde’.Footnote 84 Third Cinema manifestoes’ critiques of the typical middle class intellectual whose ‘expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society’ elicited strong resonance in Indian cine-circles. Film society members in particular, found sympathy with these manifestoes in their refusal to prescribe a textbook definition of a political aesthetic in cinema that would function as formal strategies for ‘the activation of a revolutionary consciousness’.Footnote 85 Drawing on examples of low cost and artisanal cinema from European neo-realist films and Griersonian documentaryFootnote 86, the more radical voices in the film society movement appeared to be struggling to find idioms for a ‘new, more powerful. . .programme for the political practice of cinema’. Such a practice, they hoped, would enable them ‘to conceptualize the connections between. . .[different] areas of socio-cultural life’ a task for which ‘contemporary European aesthetic ideologies’ were now seen as unhelpful.Footnote 87
It is against this varied cinematic and non-cinematic backdrop that we must view the conflicts within film society circles as they developed in its second phase. The issues ranged from questions of membership, censorship, the big city-mufassil divide, and the style of particular directors. Though apparently disparate, these issues ultimately converge on questions about the democratization of the film society movement and the making of a politically responsible cinema in India. In a marked departure from the first phase of the movement when good cinema was largely understood as a sophisticated aesthetic product, the debates of the mid 1960s seemed to push the point that good cinema was one infused with a radical, leftist, even revolutionary, political sensibility. Its mark of distinction was to be able to register the contemporary social turmoil and the political anger it gave rise to in middle-class Indians. Yet, unlike in the 1950s or early 1960s, when there was agreement among cineastes that the road to this kind of cinema lay in learning from the formal experiments carried out by French realist cinema (particularly Jean Renoir) or Italian neo-realism, the mid 1960s debates exemplify a fragmentation of that consensus. As film society activists were exposed to the French new-wave films of Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol and to films from Cuba and Latin America, understandings of politically and socially responsible cinema became a subject for debate.
Democratization of film societies
The first topic that concerned film society activists as the movement expanded during the 1960s was to redefine its aims. Many commentators argued that film societies were not meant to be art house cinemas. Arun Kaul urged the leaders of the movement to impress upon the members that ‘a film society is not a club where people merely come to see films and go’. The raison d’être of the movement was ‘to build up. . .an enlightened, discriminating minority audiences [sic] which should ultimately be providing guidance to the so-called majority audiences’.Footnote 88
Remarks such as these highlight a tension inherent in the movement. On the one hand, film societies were fired by an overt pedagogical zeal to teach the masses about good cinema. On the other hand, the assumption about the ordinary person's unpreparedness to appreciate non-mainstream films raised questions about why and how such cinema might be received by the masses. If mainstream Hindi, Bengali, or Tamil films were ensnaring the vast majority of Indian audiences through the lure of glamour and glitz, then non-mainstream cinema seemed too cerebral to draw in the same audiences. Much like the Indian People's Theatre Association or People's Writers Association, the film society movement too was caught in the conundrum that faced many left-oriented cultural organizations in India: how best to convey a progressive politics through art to the unlettered majority of Indians? Moreover, if the role of the artistic avant-garde was pedagogical, did this not, by default, make them culturally elitist vis-à-vis the majority of the people?Footnote 89 The debates of this period point to the heterogeneous views of those who now manned—they were mostly men—the film societies.
A critical issue that divided the movement in the 1960s was again that of membership. Like Halder, Suvendu Dasgupta, later professor of Economics at the University of Calcutta, and a very active film society worker during the late 1960s and 1970s, rebelled against the practice of certain film societies of shutting their doors to ‘ordinary people’. He noted, ‘some people who considered themselves experts on cinema were actually quite orthodox—they were arrogant and treated the rest with disdain’.Footnote 90 On the other side, it was alleged that the expansion in membership brought into film societies individuals who had little interest in good cinema. The allure of watching uncensored foreign films, argued critics, drew many to film society screenings. In the words of Nemai Ghosh, an active film society functionary in south India and the director of Chinnamul (1950)Footnote 91, this new category of film society members did not regard cinema as a source of ‘intellectual delight’ but as a source of ‘pathological excitement’.Footnote 92 Dhruba Gupta, professor of History in Calcutta and a regular contributor to film society publications, observed that many new members showed no interest in watching short films, or even older 16 mm films.Footnote 93
Another issue provoking comments was the already widening gap between city-based film clubs and those in smaller towns, drawing criticism from film society activists like Suvendu Dasgupta and Samik Bandyopadhyay. Bandyopdhyay remarked at a function co-organized by three societies of Calcutta, Asansol, and Naihati that in a politically disturbed region like Imphal (in north-eastern India) there were two active film societies that held film appreciation courses and also hosted film screenings even as armoured tanks rolled through the city. But these groups, he complained, barely received a mention in metropolitan cine-club discussions.Footnote 94
Many film society activists across India shared Bandyopadhyay's concerns. For example, the noted Malayalam filmmaker and film society pioneer, G. Aravindan, observed during the 1970s that ‘the real movement is not in the cities, it is in small towns and villages and this is a very significant aspect’.Footnote 95 As an example of cine-activism in rural areas, one could mention the film festival organized in Heggodu, Karnataka by the Ninasam Chitra Samaja (Ninasam Film Society).Footnote 96
Described as ‘a remote village’ Heggodu had ‘facilities of electricity, a post office, and education up to matriculation’.Footnote 97 Nearly a thousand people attended the screenings daily—this, despite the fact that the festival was scheduled during harvest season when the villagers ‘are busy both day and night’. One of the organizers reminisced that ‘at least a section of this audience does not even know the name of this country is India and also for a few of them attending film shows was a virgin experience’.Footnote 98 Twelve black and white films in 16 mm format including some documentaries were screened during the six-day film-festival (19–24 December 1977). The list included Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, 1955), Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948), Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957), Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925), Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstien, 1925) Wages of Fear (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953), Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950), Happy Anniversary (Pierre Etaix, 1962), Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) and Satyajit Ray (B. D. Garga, 1963). The Ninasam film society's selection procedures were guided by their zeal to expose the uninitiated audience to classics in world cinema and maintain a balance between ‘emotionalism’ and ‘cerebralism’. They were keen to ‘depict struggle for the basic necessities of life on different historical and topographical backdrops’. The report on the film festival noted ‘none of the films screened here. . .has any explicit sex-scene (with the exception of a kiss in Roshomon)’.Footnote 99 The Heggodu film festival reflected a spirit of urban, middle-class self critique. As observed in the same report, ‘With this experimental programme the pseudo-high-brow notion that laymen—especially the rustic, cannot appreciate films of artistic excellence comes to an end’.Footnote 100
Finally, the democratization of film societies also produced sharp differences of opinion in the ways active members came to regard the works of particular directors. These arguments were no longer made in the abstract or with reference to foreign films but using examples from the works of Indian directors. Much of the discussion rejected the ideals of ‘good cinema’ as formulated by film society pioneers during the 1950s. For the principal question now debated was whether good cinema could any longer afford to remain unmoved by the socio-political realities of India. Good cinema could not be so-called if it was divorced either in its form or content from problems such as unemployment, illiteracy, poverty, violence, war, the plight of refugees, class differences, and other such issues that were seen as corroding the Indian social fabric. These debates over good cinema map on to earlier debates involving the Progressive Writers Association, for instance, between ‘political’ literature versus a literature by men of taste—a sign of the politicization of the film society movement.Footnote 101 For reasons of space, I will focus in particular on debates generated by the works of three leading Bengali directors. Two of them also made forays into making films in other regional languages (in Oriya, Telugu, and Hindi) and one sporadically worked outside Bengal for a few years. The directors are Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, and Ritwik Ghatak.
By the mid 1960s Ray was an established filmmaker whose Apu trilogy had won him many accolades abroad. But this did not guarantee him favourable reception at home. During 1959–1973, he made several films, which opened to strong criticism from Calcutta's film-society critics.Footnote 102 According to Ashok Rudra (a Bengali economist interested in cultural debates), Ray gave no evidence in most of his films of ‘any comprehension’ of contemporary India's social problems or of ‘any capacity or inclination to tackle them’. The only exceptions were Kanchanjungha (1961) and Devi (1959). The former centered on the tensions that unfold during a middle-class family's vacation in Darjeeling, a hill-station famous for its views of the Himalayan peaks, and the latter on the deification of a young woman by her patriarchal father-in-law as a goddess with miraculous powers that ultimately drove her to suicide. Yet, argued Rudra:
One could have taken Kanchanjungha as a seriously optimistic film if it were shown that the characters were trying to find ways out for themselves by consciously changing the constricting and inhibiting environmental conditions, of course, to the extent possible. But nothing like that is done. Problems are posed, and they get simply resolved. . .and the only factor accounting for the miracle seems to be the magnificent beauty of the Kanchenjungha. If this is the way Ray would like to be humanist. . .there is indeed very little we can hope for from him in the line of treatment of modern problems.Footnote 103
In a feisty response to Rudra, Ray defended his stand in Kanchanjungha. ‘I should have thought’, he noted,
the very elements of the film—the near fairy-tale setting, the holiday mood, the two-hour span of the narrative, the fact that the characters have been divorced from their normal surroundings—would debar expectation of a realistic thrashing out of the problems. . .I am afraid Sri Rudra will have to search long and hard for the kind of film he is looking for: the vast lumbering saga in which every problem will be thrashed out. . .every emotional conflict played out, each to its ultimate limit; in which the sweet little child who does not understand today will, as Sri Rudra puts it, ‘understand one day’, and then she will cease to be sweet, she will become unhappy, gloomy, and full of complexes.Footnote 104
Ray was repeatedly criticized for his alleged failure to address social realities. The desire for political cinema, rather than ‘superb craftsmanship’ in filmmaking, was the main reason behind many film society activists’ disappointment with Ray, whom they derided, despite his success with international and domestic audiences, as a ‘bourgeois’ filmmaker. A film like Ashani Sanket (1973), based on the famine of 1943, epitomized for many film society viewers Ray's tendency to aestheticize, through his impeccable cinematic sensibility, the horrors of a man-made famine. They had hoped that the film would act as an allegory for the food riots of the 1960s. As one disappointed commentator wrote in Frontier: ‘We all hoped that we would again find the man who stood with his head high leading the silent procession of memory of the food movement martyrs in 1966. But alas, the procession has marched forward. The leader has straggled behind’.Footnote 105
If Ray was generally viewed in film society circles as lacking in political radicalism, this was not a charge that faced Mrinal Sen. Sen, more than any other filmmaker of the time was seen as someone who directly engaged with the politics of the Maoist Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). His technique of utilizing news clippings and documentary footage was praised as a more avant-garde style of filmmaking. Referring to his two films Padatik (The Guerilla Fighter, 1973) and Calcutta 71 (1972) the same Ashok Rudra who had criticized Ray, wrote, ‘. . .what gets reflected. . .is precisely the auto-criticism that is taking place among the ranks of the party’. He compared Sen to Godard as a director ‘who at the height of professional success, renounced film making for entertainment and money making, and is using it strictly as an instrument of political action’.Footnote 106
But even Sen could not satisfy all his left-leaning film society comrades. Some questioned the fact that the state-sponsored Film Finance Corporation financed his films. In the words of one commentator, ‘When the ruling power is witch-hunting the extremists throughout the country. . .destroying all genuine freedom of speech and expression, it is a matter of great wonder that they will finance Mr. Sen's effort at glorifying the cause of the extremists. . .’. Seeing Sen as a stooge of the establishment, this writer concluded, ‘it may well be that in these days of sophistication it is the well considered policy of the government not to come to a direct confrontation with the intellectuals, but to slowly win them over’. It is worth quoting some more passages from this letter from one Probodh Dhar Chakraborty from Howrah if only to highlight the tone of the criticism:
The message of both Calcutta 71 and Padatik (Sen's films) is shrouded in abstract intellectualism. . .Though it deals with serious themes as poverty and revolution, Calcutta 71 fails to convince any one of any ideal to fight for a new world. Padatik may well be an object of hot discussion in coffee houses, cafes, and restaurants but it can never be an inspiration for revolutionaries.Footnote 107
In another passage of the same letter, he gives an example from Sen's film Padatik which to his mind was an obvious distortion of ‘reality’:
Can one furnish one case in which a young middle class revolutionary escaping from a prison van, has taken shelter in a multi-storeyed flat of a woman executive? To give a touch of reality to this romantic fantasy Mrinal Sen had no other option but to show that her younger brother was also a revolutionary shot dead by the police.Footnote 108
The director who emerges as the most favoured in film society writings was Ritwik Ghatak. There were several reasons for this. First, the producer of most of Ghatak's films was Pramod Lahiri, a member of the Cine Club of Calcutta. This made it easy for film societies to exhibit Ghatak's films. Second, many regarded Ghatak to be a true breakaway from the dominant modes of narrative cinema established by Hollywood or Bombay and Calcutta.
Much has been written about Ghatak's films. Some salient features of his oeuvre are flagged here to help the reader understand his appeal to film societies. Ghatak started out as a communist cultural worker with the Indian People's Theatre Association and then became an overtly leftist filmmaker with Nagarik, completed in 1952, but released posthumously in the 1970s. Ghatak's later films wove in multiple themes of the decline that had set in postcolonial Bengali bhadralok (respectable) lives that resonated deeply with film society audiences.Footnote 109 His background in the Association made him introduce theatre as the site within his films where many dramatic crises unfolded, forcing his audiences to ponder the problems facing political theatre in India, in the face of more commercially viable forms of entertainment.
According to Kumar Shahani, who studied with Ghatak during the latter's stint at the Pune Film Institute and was an active member of the Anandam film society, Ghatak's work constituted a defiant assertion of identity that challenged both indigenous and Western structures of domination.
In an atmosphere where our cultural attitudes and artifacts [sic] have been identified with the objectification of effete Brahminism and European humanism inflicted on us by the colonials, Ritwikda's work is the violent assertion of our identity. It is the cry of the dying girl in Meghe Dhaka Tara that echoes through the hills, our right to live.Footnote 110
In his recent book on the cinemas on Indian partition, Bhaskar Sarkar argues that juxtaposed to Ray's restrained modernism, Ghatak's excessive melodrama often baffled ‘bourgeois urban audiences’. But not his followers in film societies. As observed by Amiya Bagchi, better known for his works on economic history than on films,
Ghatak not only appropriated mythopoeic images to his own art, in some sense he also effected a restitution of the myths to the original makers, rescuing them from a Brahmanised or reified, demonic state. Instead of myths exercising a supernatural power over people, in Ghatak's art, they became tools of people's power.Footnote 111
Another aspect of Ghatak's work that film society circles received sympathetically, contrary to similar elements with Ray, was his treatment of superstitions and rituals.
Ghatak did not. . .share the Bengali liberal's distaste for what he considered to be the superstitions or rituals clouding the visions of ordinary people in our country. The liberation of the people would not for him mean an existence where life had been purged of all social ritual, and all spontaneous expression. . .though it may not always meet the standards of the cultivated taste of an enlightened Indian.Footnote 112
Finally, film societies lauded Ghatak's handling of the traumas of partition in a non-prescriptive manner. Many film society writings attempted to rescue ‘Ghatak's obsessive use of the theme of partition of Bengal’ from accusations of nostalgia: ‘[B]eyond the whys and wherefores of the partition lies the grim fact of the cruelty of the whole process. . .the utter senselessness of it’.Footnote 113
Conclusion
To summarize some of the most striking achievements of film societies in a telegraphic fashion we would have to note the role played by various societies in organizing retrospectives of Indian studio era films and the works of certain foreign directors. Film societies first introduced Indian audiences to Iranian, Czech, Korean, and other emerging cinemas of the world.Footnote 114 Secondly, film societies provided a space for the exhibition of short films and documentaries like Mukti Chai (Utpalendu Chakroborty, 1977) or Hungry Autumn (Gautam Ghose, 1974) on controversial, anti-establishment themes such as famines and political prisoners.Footnote 115 Thirdly, film societies were a ‘forum to [exhibit] films which would not be in normal commercial circuits’.Footnote 116 Indeed, without the film society movement the history of ‘art’ cinema remains incomplete.
Finally, film societies made cinema a site of debate for academics and intellectuals who were not otherwise specialists on films. Their debates in the 1960s and 1970s signposted an efflorescence of critical views about ‘political cinema’ and its relationship with ‘the people’ of India. It cannot be without significance that many of the participants in these debates had little to do with the making or marketing of films. It is striking, for instance, to stay with the example of the intellectual turmoil in Calcutta in the 1960s, that so many publications on non-mainstream cinema in India came from humanistically inclined social scientists—Amiya Bagchi (economist), Pranab Bardhan (economist), Gautam Bhadra (historian), Anjan Ghosh (sociologist), Dhruba Gupta (historian), Suvendu Dasgupta (economist), Ashok Rudra (economist)—to take some names at random.Footnote 117 Similarly, journals like Mainstream or Frontier, which were political organs for politically inclined scholars played host to many film society debates that have been briefly referenced above. In retrospect however, it must be noted that despite their commitment to democratic ideals, the emphasis on viewing cinema as an object of intellectual debate prevented a more nuanced understanding of the larger Indian audience and their love of popular commercial cinema by film societies.Footnote 118 Ultimately, this failure to connect with and to understand popular culture as a serious subject of analysis no doubt made film societies into something of an ivory tower, leading to a slow atrophy of the movement.
