Sen, Mrinal

b. 14 May 1923, Faridpur, (present day) Bangladesh
d. 30 December 2018, Calcutta, India

If you cannot bear these stories then it is society that is unbearable. Who am I to remove the clothes of this society, which itself is naked. I don’t even try to cover it, because it is not my job, that’s the job of dressmakers.

– Saadat Hasan Manto

I can’t deliberately make a popular film. Indian audiences seek escape from their daily lives when they go to the cinema – my subjects are too close to daily life for popular appeal… I feel it is not enough to disturb the audience – it is necessary to act as an agent provocateur.

– Mrinal Sen¹

It is not my goal to advance some mysterious pre-eminence of form over substance. “Art for art’s sake” is no less heretical in the cinema. Perhaps more so! But for each new topic, a new form! And one way to understand better what a film is trying to say is to see how it is saying it.

– André Bazin²

Despite shaping the contours of Indian parallel cinema with an oeuvre spanning over 50 years, Mrinal Sen’s work often gets forgotten on the global stage, shadowed by his new-wave contemporaries, Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. Sen’s filmic lyricism is considered rougher and jagged, with a style that is as intense and unabashed about its political leanings, as is varied in genre. He considered himself an anguished documentarian of dissent, eager to attack the poverty, exploitation and inherent hypocrisy of society prevalent across the country. Naturally then, his narratives were difficult to swallow when compared to the gently spun, poetic lyricism established by his parallel-cinema contemporaries.

Through his films, he sought to provoke the country’s elite middle classes, calling out their “reverie of callousness,”³ while giving a platform to their oppressed victims. This translated to a “harsh” cinematic penmanship, jolting in its honesty.

It is understandable, then, to see Sen so routinely classified as one of India’s first neo-realists. Moreso when one considers some of his greatest influences – Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Giuseppe de Santis – all of whom he regularly paid homage in his films.

However, an intimate study of Sen’s works reveals a filmography that married political fervour with experimental, stylistically unconventional frames. They interlaced the sensibilities of European art cinema and Italian neo-realism, with the aesthetics of politics and modernism. Doing so, Sen crafted a style that veers among angry, bitter, gloomy, dark, and even terrifying in its bleakness, but complex in its ability to ponder universal truths about injustice, capitalism and the human condition. This is quite resemblant of his other cinematic influences – Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Jean-Luc Godard.

Instigated by André Bazin’s interpretation of realism and Alexandre Astruc’s essay on auteur theory, this essay analyses a selection of Sen’s films to posit the following: the radical auteur’s unique style blended Italian neo-realist, Cinema Novo and European arthouse principles to create a heightened sense of cinematic reality which toed the lines of surrealism, while staying brutally honest to the realities of everyday life. I term this, surreal realism.

In order to help validate this claim with a sense of academic rigor, this essay is subsequently structured as follows. First, I will define and outline formal elements that comprise “surreal realism” – retracing the previously defined tenets of filmic surrealism and realism, and how this particular stylistic interpretation is different. Following this, I attempt to exemplify elements of Sen’s “surreal realism,” by briefly interpreting a selection of his works through a formalist lens, deliberately focusing on cinematic elements that he quilted together to forge his style.

 Considering the limits of this essay and Sen’s expansive cannon, the reader will allow me, I hope, to frame the aforementioned thesis on a mere excerpt of his work: one film, with limited references to two others, deliberately chosen to represent contrasting chapters of Mrinal Sen’s evolution as an auteur.

The film analysed is Calcutta ‘71 (1971). It represents a phase when Sen began experimenting with traditional narrative structure with a sense of audacity and renewed vigour, following a slew of commercial successes between 1960-69 (specifically, his breakout hit Bhuvan Shome (Mr. Shome, 1969). Films made during this phase represent the most dramatic period of Sen’s artistic style, in which he blatantly interwove neo-realist agitprop with art-house flourishes. Calcutta ‘71 is one of the three films that make up his “Calcutta trilogy” – a stylistically raw, provocative contrast to Satyajit Ray’s own “Calcutta trilogy.”

Calcutta ’71

Limited references are made herein to Ek Din Achanak (Suddenly, One Day, 1989), created during an era where Sen was rediscovering himself through film. Here, he takes a step back from his “radical auteurship,” resorting to a mellower, more mainstream cinematic approach. And yet, he complexly underscores a deceptively simple narrative with a series of thematic references and sharp juxtapositions. It is a contemplative film that helps reiterate Sen’s unique interpretation of conventional “realism.”

In art, both the real and imaginary belong to the artist alone. By concentrating on what is diffused in life, realism allows viewers to fully engage with a subject in all its mystery

– André Bazin

At a first reading, surreal realism might suggest either a blending of two seemingly contradictory artistic movements, or an interpreted redundancy. However, I propose that there is an intertextuality between the styles that creates space for a tangible, recombinant bridge. Before expounding thereon, it is perhaps beneficial to align my interpretation of the two movements, and their prescribed limits.

“Realism,” or “realist style” within the context of this essay, refers to cinematic characteristics exemplified by the neo-realists, defined and further interpreted by André Bazin, and more recently, Robert Sklar and A.O. Scott. The style entails rendering social actuality as an art, while attempting to represent the human experience in a raw, gritty and documentary-esque narrative state outside the conventions of entertainment genres. As one of the first championing the movement, Bazin celebrated the neo-realists for giving viewers the perfect illusion of reality, one compatible with the logical demand of a film narrative. He defended the true-to-life interpretation of dismay and confusion that clouded post-war Italy as a form of expressive progress – a stylistic growth, and triumphant evolution of film language. In Bazinian theory, Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti’s work served the primordial function of film: to align with a humanist and realist approach to art, ensuring a democratic medium that could represent the world substantially free of the biases of the artist.

There is common consensus that, speaking stylistically, the “realist” label serves every system of expression and narrative procedure which brings a greater degree of reality to the screen, subject to the interpretation of “reality inherent to the artform.”⁴ Across the neo-realists’ work, this entailed the casting of nonprofessional actors, portraying characters close to their real selves; the use of unadorned, specific locations and an absorption in the ordinary details of life. Most importantly, the style preserves a sense of reality by leaving intact a linear temporal flow, or as Bazin argued “the assemblage of the film must never add anything to the existing reality.”⁵

It is fitting then, to appreciate Sen’s work as realist – he recognised the need to create a body of film work reflecting the intense social and political turmoil that had come to sweep across Calcutta at a time when understanding of and compassion for the poor, the homeless, and the starving were in terribly short supply. And he cinematically translated this with an activist spirit, skilfully and often brutally thrust upon his audience – as seen in Sen’s agitprop anthology studied in this paper.

Similar to the post-war films of Vittorio De Sica, Sen’s artistry as an “agent provocateur,” lies not just in his narrative indictments of the “system,” but in his ability to replicate the neo-realist’s volatile alloy of documentary and theatrical elements.⁶ Calcutta ‘71 comprises – much like De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948) or more closely, Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) – simple, fablelike stories told to the beat of quotidian rhythms – a midnight deluge amidst the slums of Calcutta, a group of women chafing rice in the courtyard of a derelict house, a boy running through paddy in a rural province. The film comprises four stories that span several decades, featuring a motley crew of characters who show not only emotion, but the reserve of people whose dignity is at stake.

In De Sica’s classic, Antonio Ricci wants to work and finds a job pasting movie posters to empty stretches of roadside wall. He gets the job because he owns a bicycle, and when it is stolen, everything else starts to unravel – a fate he shares with Ranjit Mallick in Sen’s Calcutta ‘71 (and Interview (1971)), whose attempts to find a pair of formal “western” clothes for an interview later that day founder in the face of social injustice, poor planning and plain bad luck as he travails through the city across a series of unfortunate events. In the film, Sen, much like De Sica, acknowledges the reality of life – brutal and depressing, but with an underlying sense of human persistence.

But there’s an oneiric quality to Sen’s sharp intercuts, seamless juxtapositions and experimental frames that go beyond the temporal constraints of Bazinian realism and neo-realist practices.

“Surrealism,” or a “surrealist style” within the limits of this essay, draws its interpretation from David Bordwell’s The Art Cinema As a Mode of Film Practice (1979), as well as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929). Specifically, I reference the style’s trademark use of dreamlike, sometimes irrational imagery, non-linear or disjointed narrative, unconventional storytelling and symbolism – as seen in poetic use, in Dalí and Buñuel’s film. Bordwell expounds on the apparent lack of cause-effect linkage of events, defending their presence through psychological causation, enabling a drifting, episodic quality to an art film’s narrative.

In Calcutta ‘71, psychological causation provides context for what might otherwise seem a rather lucid opening sequence, rife with seemingly disconnected symbolism: the protagonist from Sen’s previous film (Interview) is seen in dystopian courtroom, before a sardonic judge. There’s a state of hell-like silence, interrupted by canned laughter, sounds of a creaking fan, and stacks of unread court documents. The court itself is theatrical in its abstract appearance. The protagonist is grilled by a prosecutor, as we cut to close up shots of his victim: a naked mannequin wearing a noose in the witness stand. The laughter, literal “heat” of the moment (represented through the legal circus sweating and complaining about power cuts), and callous judicial playout all represent a claustrophobic state of disgust that the protagonist feels against the “system” for having recently lost a job opportunity due to a bigoted interviewer. The film’s prologue feels abstract, yet set within the very real, bloody communist riots of 1971 in Bengal, Sen uses a larger sense of space, time and reality by creating a theatrical courtroom set up in limbo – resonant of a symbolic judgment day.

Sen’s filmic intentions in crafting his absurdist tableaux of desperation certainly align with Bordwell’s interpretation of surrealist cinema of the Eisenstein/Fellini variety – defined by him through their consistent violation of the classical frameworks of time and space, justified as the intrusion of an unpredictable daily reality, or as the subjective reality of psychologically complex characters.⁷

While celebrating art cinema’s stylistic deviations from the classical canon, Bordwell cautions about the limits of projecting psychological uncertainty and expressionist symbolism and admits that a realist and an expressionist aesthetic are difficult, if not impossible, to seamlessly merge. He warns that this blend could create a haphazard narrative that shrouds or distracts from the auteur’s signature.

How then, do we interpret and classify the style of Mrinal Sen, an auteur who unabashedly stole from across his range of influences from French New Wave to Soviet Montage to Neo-realism to German Expressionism? To what extent does this temporal disavowal of reality fall within the lines of pre-existing formalisms? Is this recombinant bridge an evolution in film style, similar to how Bazin termed neo-realism the “new” turn of film language, in the late 1940s?

I know how simple a good film can look, and how difficult it is to be simple. Let there be a bit of madness and flippancy there too. Let there be a release of it up there on the screen. 

– Mrinal Sen

One can defend Sen’s style through calling upon Alexandre Astruc’s The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra Stylo (1948), as well as Andrew Sarris’s Notes on The Auteur Theory (1962). Astruc claimed that cinema should be regarded as a personal and expressive medium, and the camera similar to a writer’s pen or a painter’s brush.⁸ In the essay, Astruc advocates for filmmakers to approach the camera with the same artistic freedom and individuality that a writer approaches a blank page. In this analogy, the camera becomes a tool for personal expression and creativity.

Astruc argues that cinema is not just a means of recording reality but a language in itself. He suggests that filmmakers should use this language to convey their thoughts, emotions, and ideas. By treating the camera as a pen, filmmakers can create a unique cinematic style, shaping the narrative and visual elements according to their artistic vision; in so proclaiming, Astruc laid the foundation for “auteur theory.”

The crux of Astruc’s paper – the democratization of filmmaking and rejection of studio systems⁹ – feels resonant of Sen’s filmmaking style, with which he openly repudiated the studio system of Bollywood. A vehement advocate of democratized production, Sen positioned himself at the heart of various protests, riots and floods throughout West Bengal to obtain footage that he interlaces across most of his films.

What if we then read the blending of two different film styles as the deliberate thumbprint of the auteur? A recombinant style that delicately balances the principles of heightened realism, with the overtures of surrealist expressionism which I classified as “surreal realism.”

One could further “codify” Sen’s stylistic blend through the following tenets:

• Narrative structure (Stories steeped in reality). Everyday characters and plots with a detailed focus on the complexity that makes up the mundane; stories that showcase the true-to-life interpretation of dismay or exploitation caused by circumstance; casting of nonprofessional actors, portraying characters close to their real selves; the use of unadorned, specific locations and an absorption in the ordinary details of life. Within the umbrella of the realistic narrative, the plot might take unexpected turns, incorporating dream sequences, symbolism, or oneiric events.

• Visual style (Raw, but stylised). A narrative that maintains a raw, gritty, and documentary-esque approach, interlacing an “illusion” of reality, with documented, actual depictions of the world. Sen’s longtime cinematographer-artistic collaborator K.K Mahajan created a near trademark across his canon with visual elements that embrace the realistic portrayal of settings, characters, and everyday life – with occasional surreal, or oneiric sequences, intercuts, exaggerated stylisations and unconventional tilt-pan-zoom combinations.

• Interrupted time (Temporal fractures & juxtapositions). With the overall, linear narrative, there exist chapters, phases or beats with temporal fractures. These are depicted through sudden juxtapositions, jarring intercuts, unrelated segues, and a sense of self-reflexivity (through fourth wall-breaks) – in short, breakdowns of the motivation of cinematic space and time by cause-effect logic. These fractures feel almost trademark to Sen’s work: a 4th wall, live-animation sequence during a chase in his 1969 film, Mr. Shome; in Interview the protagonist directly addresses us, followed by “viewers” having a conversation with him during a bus-ride (as well as a sudden behind-the-scenes sequence when the protagonist takes control of the camera); juxtapositions and a suspended sense of time in Calcutta ’71 , as well as Suddenly, One Day. 

• Character development within actualité (Symbolic journeys). Within the context of the realistic storyline, characters experience symbolic journeys that reflect inner psychological states. These journeys are executed in a manner that doesn’t distract from the umbrella narrative, but adds to the raw, realistic setting. For example, we follow Shabana Azmi’s character in Suddenly, One Day, as she muses to herself, her partner, and sister over why her father has disappeared. She does so by sitting around the house, pausing, staring, ambling through his study – at one point even going for a movie with her partner. There’s a very real forlorn sense of stopped time – but at no point are we “fully” transported into a dream or nightmare sequence, or a recreation of events (i.e. total surrealism).

• Sound & Score (Frenetic beats). Limited use of music and beats to help drive a frenetic, exaggerated sense of anguish, without altering the pace of the overall narrative. These bursts of music help underscore a character’s psychological state, or transition viewers into an oneiric pause, or a new chapter in the narrative.

 In order to best demonstrate Sen’s use of surreal realism, his seminal film, Calcutta ’71 will be analysed through the framework of the aforementioned tenets. Through this exercise, I aim to highlight Sen’s stylistic exaggerations which so masterfully disavow our perception of reality, while staying rooted, honest and near documentary-like in their affect.

Original brochure of Calcutta ’71, designed by Abhijit Gupta

Calcutta ‘71 was Sen’s attempt to interpret the turbulence of West Bengal from the 1940s-70s, underscoring a historical and political continuity of imperialism, manipulation, economic deprivation, under-development and workers’ struggles. The film was shot in 1971, a year when, according to official figures, the city was witnessing over 200 protest-related killings every month. Sen foments this state-wide disarray, anger and frustration throughout the film, bringing together four different stories, in distinct chapters. Each chapter is interlinked by a poetic intertitle that repeatedly laments the impact of poverty and misery in Calcutta. The mode varies from satire to drama, and the method is fragmentary narration – in effect, the end result is quite similar to Mikhail Katalozov’s 1964 classic, Soy Cuba.

Narrative structure (Stories steeped in reality)

Following a rapidly paced city montage, the film opens with Sen’s previous protagonist (Ranjit Mallick, Interview), in a limbo-esque courtroom. The character’s debate with the other occupants of a dysfunctional courtroom sets the stage for the state of systemic disarray in the city – at one point, the anguished protagonist screams, “The system is broken”; to which the court agrees, distractedly referencing power cuts that have besieged the city. The entire sequence is rife with cynicism, blatantly calling out the judicial theatrics that had paralysed Calcutta at the time. 

This absurdist “prologue” rapidly tapers off, plunging us into another city montage in which old and new technology, gadgets, political movements of the day, and abject poverty, past and present, are spotlighted. The previous protagonist (Ranjit Mallick)’s seemingly trivial vandalism is thus contextualized within the larger narrative of inequality, moving us into the film’s first “chapter.”

The first story, set in 1933, amplifies the narrative of inequality as we steer into the city’s ramshackle by lanes into a 2m x 2m slum dwelling where a family of five huddles together, desperate to stay dry through a stormy deluge. Between claps of thunder, the family’s roof collapses, forcing the family to flee to a dryer space: an overcrowded storm shelter. The vivid visualization of the rain, the grimy reality of the family’s enclave, and their ironic search for shelter just after the family’s patriarch threw out their dog, all make the story evocative even as it bears the imprint of realism, underlined by its use of documentary footage.

Among the misery, Sen folds instances of humour – the mother obsessing over the way her daughter’s holding an umbrella, a festering husband-wife relationship, and a sense of melancholic dreaminess as the husband stares into the rain – inviting us to join him as he ponders their state of helplessness.

The second story occurs in 1943, and starts with the face of a recently widowed woman (Madhabi Mukherjee), as she narrates her struggles in a letter to her brother. We follow a government officer from Delhi visit his extended family in Calcutta, only to unexpectedly discover that his aunt (Binota Roy) has pushed her daughters – one of whom is the widowed woman seen at the start of the chapter, the other, a teenager – into prostitution, and her underage son into thieving.

The officer at first questions his family’s circumstance, and the seemingly well-off life that they’re living in the face of the famine – Sen emphasizes the officer’s disdain by juxtaposing the somewhat theatrical set up with actual footage from the 1943 famine, showing children starving and families dying. Within the narrative, the women’s reality is ripped open in a scene when the daughters physically and emotionally confront their mother in the house courtyard. The story of the mother who betrays her children in Calcutta ’71 is thereby located within the vortex of multi-layered narratives, generated by referencing other films and texts, thereby emphasizing a continued history of degeneration.

The third story opens with a close up of a lady cleaning rice and is set in 1953. It follows the mother-son relationship in a rural, middle-class family, where the eldest son smuggles rice across the state – a common practice at the time, to get higher sales volumes. The young boy, aged 15 (Haradhan Bandopadhyay), leads a troupe of delinquents as they avoid the railway police for the duration of their inter-state journey. We see the boys’ inter-class and intra-class dynamics, as they interact with wealthier passengers on the train ride. Over the course of the train ride, Sen suspends time as we revisit the boy’s past through sudden flashbacks, his “origin story” replicated (almost like a scene within a scene) through realistic conversations among the train passengers – and inter-caste dynamics at play.  

The fourth story is based in 1971, and enacted through the cross section of an upper-class “society party,” where Sen flits between various social circles in different stages of gossip. An aristocratic artist laments about the ‘43 famine, and philosophizes about the condition of the poor in the country. In truth, the artist is an exploitative factory owner, and the entire set up is riddled with hypocrisy. Sen attempts to create a realistic glimpse into elite and superficial Bengali society moulded by foreign systems, contrasted by abject poverty in the slums.

The film’s epilogue features another symbolic sequence, serving as a surrealist book-end. In this allegorical scene, “truth” is represented by a young revolutionary who is desperate to overturn the machinations of the Calcutta’s corrupt. He escapes the police and anti-resistance forces – who chase him around in a spaceless sequence, wearing Dalí masks. Eventually, “truth” is found, hiding behind a tree, where he’s shot dead, point-blank. It’s a sardonic and harsh gaze at the state of affairs in Calcutta.

Visual style (Raw, but stylised)

The relentless torrent of both surrealistic and documentary segments weave together an only seemingly fragmented narrative, that gently flits between self-reflexive and total satire. Sen almost goads us into transcending the immediacy of visual storytelling, and recognizing the degradation and deprivation that have overtaken the city through his anthology. And yet, each chapter is treated with a distinct style, within the folds of his surreal realism treatment.

Interview

Chapter divides are created through repetitive intertitles featuring a Bengali poem – the lack of any voice over, score or montage in these sections suddenly slows things down, suspending us as we reflect on the visual spectacle of death that he’s introduced (in each preceding chapter/story).

Following the prologue, Sen introduces a montage of contemporary city life in which old and new technology, gadgets, political movements of the day, and abject poverty, past and present, are highlighted. Ranjit’s seemingly trivial vandalism is thus located within the larger context of a history of inequality.

This is further emphasized through the class divide Sen introduces in the first chapter, which I consider the most visually rich. The chapter begins with contrasting stills showcasing rich-poor dwellings across Calcutta. Shaky, slow frames follow the family as they move through the alley in search of shelter – a break from the smooth pans and tilts through which we explore their tiny house, which itself is introduced through detailed close-ups showcasing the material “grime” that makes up their poverty.

These include, panning to the floor, potholes in the foreground, legs of a broken bed resting on bricks in the background; detailed close-ups of rotting metal material used for the house roof; steady panning across an assortment of kitchen utensils, lined up as they collect water dripping from the roof. He even establishes an inter-house class structure using a hierarchical mise-en-scène, whose effect would seem to have influenced that in Bong Joon-ho’s Gisaengchung (Parasite, 2019): the father sleeping right at the “top” of the house (a bed stilted on bricks), perched in the corner of the house; the sons sleeping under the bed, on a slightly raised platform; the mother sitting beside the platform (on a lower level), nursing her infant; the two daughters trying to sleep by her feet.

The second chapter starts with the protagonist’s face against in a dark void-like-space, resembling the sky, as she reads out her letter. We match cut to the moon for an ellipsis, followed by a new city montage, contextualizing the devastation of the famine in 1943. When the daughters fight with their mother in the house courtyard, Sen zooms into the older daughter’s face, breaking the otherwise subdued sequence to exaggerate a sense of anguish.

The film’s fourth chapter, designed to immerse the audience in the throes of Calcutta’s elite/upper-class hypocrisy, feels most frenetic. Strobe lighting and a fast-paced beat from an off-stage band (to which we routinely intercut) build energy and pace as we move between different groups in the party.

As each group gets more brazen with their concern for the country, waxing eloquent about ways they’d like to save it, Sen cuts to real footage of the city’s poor, homeless and starving. The group moves from calm and gesticulating, to downright drunk and tone-deaf, the band builds momentum, and we cut to stop-motion intertitles that sync to the beat with the words: “Hope. Frustration. Hunger. Joblessness. Treachery by Ancestors.” As the band reaches its crescendo, we see footage of protests, violent mobs and police brutality that had inflicted Calcutta in the 1970-71 riots, intercut with the words “Sacking. Lockout. Capitalism. Strikes,” followed by a scream, and a fade to black. The effect is nauseating, nightmarish and almost brutal in progression.

The “streets” play the role of a symbolic character, present through most of the chapters in Calcutta ’71. At times, we see pantomime actions carried out on the screen in an oneiric phantasmagorical scenario, transforming the streets into a performance set-up (particularly during the prologue, epilogue and fourth chapter). In the end, with the final frame of a bullet ridden body of the revolutionary, it becomes a definite political manifesto.

Interrupted time (Temporal fractures & juxtapositions)

The film’s overall narrative follows a linear arc (split between 1943, ‘53, and ‘71), however, typical to Sen, each chapter has several instances of broken time. This is treated both formally through clear juxtapositions, and informally through expressionist totems.

Although the first and second chapters are more clearly rooted in the “present,” the third sees two treatments of time and space. Most of the narrative takes place within the confines of a train berth, where we see our protagonist (Haradhan Bandopadhyay) interact with his gang, deal with harassment from fellow (upper-class) passengers, avoid the police, and mull over his life.

The journey itself feels suspended, with no clarity on length or where he’s going, and this sense of suspension is emphasized as we cut to his village, where his mother and sister go through the routines of two full days. A sense of “grounded” suspension is further created through repeated cuts of the boys’ mother standing in a timeless field, yelling out his name – a frame that occurs three times over the story, eventually concluding it as we see our protagonist gaze into the distance, reliving his childhood and travails.

Suddenly, One Day

Character development within actualité (Symbolic journeys)

While the film presents several instances of characters breaking away from the narrative as they undergo psychological transformations, one of the most symbolic – and abstract – instances of journey takes place during the film’s epilogue. A man – presumably a revolutionary – is chased as the camera frantically follows him. He jumps between narrow by-lanes and wider streets, desperately running away from the gun. His desperate run culminates in a field, where he is fatally shot by a bullet. We hear the voice of an a-sympathetic newsreader: “A young man, aged twenty and unidentified, found dead in the Maidan with three bullet injuries…”

The sequence, deliberately book-ending the film, feels like the death of a dream. Through this, Sen leaves the audience pondering over the often repeated horror of reality that flooded Calcutta’s streets in the 1970s – we see a montage of dismembered bodies of young revolutionaries lying on the streets in the open. The discovery of this physical scar on the streets is also a traumatic blow to the mental self-image of the city wrecked by political violence.

Evasion, escape and journey are another set of symbols that plague the film, established through tropes of men on the run (the family patriarch trying to find dry ground during the deluge; the government office leaving the women once he discovers their despair; the teenage boy smuggling rice across state borders; the revolutionary running away from a bullet). We even witness the aristocrats escape – but rather than a physical running away, Sen portrays them drowning out their misery in a state of drunken fugue, amplifying their hypocrisy. 

Sound & Score (Frenetic beats)

Sen and Ananda Shankar employ not just music, but also silence to drive pace, tone and emphasis through the film.

The film starts with a sense of silence, accompanied by stills showing various parts of Calcutta in 1971 – bridges, city, a festival, riots, newspaper printing, stills of the riots, police, urban high-rises, stills of famine, starving kids, bomb bursts, theatre, stadiums. Gradually, sounds from the city – specifically the streets (vehicles, shouting, protestors screaming) – create a beat, intensifying and immersing us into a state of overall chaos. This is followed by utter silence, save for the sound of a creaking fan: we’re in the hellish courtroom.

The silence is interrupted as the sequence ends, throwing us in the midst of a recreated protest. Just as this intensifies, we’re met with a vacuum, accompanying the first set of intertitles. 

The sound of rain forms the narrative canvas for the first chapter, following us on the streets, its patter growing louder against a tin roof, crescendos as it fights to drown out the voices of the huddled up family. Steady, melancholic strings harmonize with their penury, creeping in only a handful of times over the course of the entire sequence. Sen zooms in towards the end with his heightened drumbeats, resembling a folk dance. These beats continue over the course of the film, acting as a sort of “chorus of misery” in each chapter.

Drumbeats emphasize footage of the famine in the second chapter, intercut only with sounds from the city, and timelessness when we’re introduced to the women living in the brothel.

A mother’s scream for her son (“Gourangoo”), punctuates the third chapter three times, which is otherwise almost operatic in its score through the protagonist breaking into lamenting songs as he runs towards the trains, and over several instances in the berth. His motley crew join him in song – written as improvised, mellow voice overs of our character studying his co-passengers in the train berth.

Sen’s intention is to humiliate viewers into a state of self-awareness in their hypocrisy – he throws aside all the poetic, mellow sonnets from the third chapter, and hijacks us with strobe-like beats from a band in the fourth chapter. This intensifies as the film culminates in its epilogue. 

Thus, by creating a narrative style that blends elements of visual structure, a sense of oneiric timelessness, symbolic character journeys all steeped in scores that vacillate between frenetic, and meditative, Sen’s thumbprint is unique in his surreal-realist interpretation of Calcutta through the film’s vignettes. There recurs the realization of the anguish of ordinary living in Sen’s work, the discovery of unrelieved misery, relayed through juxtapositions and seemingly random intercuts, seen through the perspectives of the slum dwellers, famine survivors and displaced city-goers of Calcutta ’71.

Selected Filmography

• Bhuvan Shome (Mr. Shome, 969)
• Akash Kusum (Celestial Flower, 1965)
• Interview (1971)
• Calcutta ’71 (1972)
• Mrigaya (The Royal Hunt, 1976)
• Ek Din Pratidin (A Day Like Any Other, 1979)
• Ek Din Achanak (Suddenly, One Day, 1989)
• Aamaar Bhuvan (My Land, 2002)

Endnotes