Osian's - Cinefan 6

GURU DUTT

On the occasion of Guru Dutt’s 40th death anniversary this year, Osian’s-Cinefan is proud to pay homage to one of India’s most respected and inventive directors through a selection of films, which he directed, produced and in which he starred.

Guru Dutt’s haunting, visionary and intensely personal cinema was created within the matrix of a hard-core commercial Hindi film industry. His achievement was without any support from either international critical opinion or the film festival circuit. There was no critical appreciation of his work from eminent film critics of India. He worked in cinema for 19 years as an assistant director, dance director, scriptwriter, actor, director and producer. It was his work as a director that has left its permanent mark on the world of Hindi cinema. In the 13 years of his work as director he experienced great commercial successes and disastrous failures. Though his body of work ranged from light comedy to high tragedy it showed a remarkable cohesiveness of style, the true hallmark of a great auteur.

Guru Dutt’s comedies are full of gentle irony, intelligent use of slapstick, deft pacing and visual wit supported by keen verbal wit. His control over choreography stems from his training with Uday Shankar whose seminal film Kalpana was a permanent source of inspiration for Guru Dutt. He learnt from it that choreography for camera was a different art from shooting dances. Guru Dutt’s lighting aided by his brilliant director of photography, V. K. Murthy, ranged from stark silhouettes to softly lyrical images, always creating a strong mood. His precise lensing, ranging from wide angle to telephoto, moulded space to suit his vision. His imaginative mise en scčne allowed him unexpected use of everyday spaces such as a garage for brilliantly choreographed song sequences. His decoupage was rhythmic even in his non-musical scenes. His acute observation of the lives of common people with whom he sympathised, gave us some remarkable characters and dialogues.

His comedies alone would not have ensured him a permanent place in the pantheon of Indian directors. It was his tragic vision, with its spiritual links with the romanticism in the literature and art of Bengal that gave us three of his most remarkable films, Pyaasa, Kagaz Ke Phool and Sahib, Bibi aur Gulam. Though not a trilogy, they can be seen as a triptych of a self-destructive and deeply pessimistic vision. But it is not the thematic content of his romanticism that makes for their greatness. It is Guru Dutt’s mastery over the medium of cinema, his ability to transform his vision into a series of poignant cinematic images that makes them great. These images linger for long years in the mind. In creating them he stretches space with wide-angle lenses. He creates strong dramatic moods with a brilliant use of chiaroscuro with its overpowering, rich blacks, subtly resonant dark grays and virginal whites. His camera movements range from imperceptible tracks to swooping cranes, all of which have a deep sense of rhythm. His control over music and dance combined with his powerful visual imagery creates a world which evokes the real world, with loving care given to the minutest detail. But this real world of appearances is just a platform to launch us into an oneiric inner world of our loves and hates, our desires and passions, our life and death. Guru Dutt was both the creator of this world and its victim. His films created deeply tragic images of self-destruction through alcohol. Like Pygmalion, he watched them and was utterly fascinated by them. Then, like the Chinese painter who had fashioned a life-like landscape and stepped into it to vanish forever, he moved from the real world into the world of his imagination to enter the realm of shadows never to return.

Arun Khopkar