In October, the Lincoln Public Library is the place for films from India. Last year we celebrated the centenary of Indian cinema, which, while older than the nation itself, continues to turn up exciting and thought-provoking surprises.
Mumbai is the home of India’s Hindi-language film industry, commonly known as Bollywood, which produces over 1,000 films (and sells more than 3.5 billion tickets) annually. With a giant like that—purveyor of glamorous stars, elaborate song sequences, and narrative incomprehensibility—dominating film production in India, it is not surprising that the more artistic, independent and socially engaged films get overlooked. “Beyond Bollywood ’14: The Many Faces of Indian Art Cinema” attempts to right that wrong by highlighting the overlooked.
As with past years, the “Beyond Bollywood” festival will be a grab bag of vastly different films, variously off-the-radar and against-the-grain, that comprise a cursory survey of what’s going on outside of the mainstream in India.
Alms for a Blind Horse (Anhey Ghorhey Da Daan)
Tuesday, October 7 at 7 p.m.
India / 2011 / in Punjabi with English subtitles / 112 minutes
Mesmerizing and meditative, Gurvinder Singh’s Alms for a Blind Horse moves intuitively, rather than with narrative logic, between characters and settings. Comparing the plight of poor people in rural India with those in urban centers, it begins with a Punjabi village where the farmers are being mercilessly forced off their land. Then it brings us to the city, where the son of one farmer is a rickshaw-puller living among the simmering tension as his brethren try to unionize for fair wages. A disciple of Mani Kaul (whose last film credit appears here)—and by extension, Robert Bresson—Singh treats the mise-en-scène as the cinematic space where actor and the object intersect. The lush greens in the landscape of Punjab are drained to pale grays, palpably cold and mist-shrouded, while the shots tend to be quite sustained, matching the icy tones of composer Catherine Lamb’s score. Like in Kaul’s famously austere Uski Roti (1969), objects and routines are heavy with ambiguity, with possible and elusive meaning.
Ship of Theseus
Tuesday, October 14 at 7 p.m.
India / 2012 / in English, Arabic, Swedish and Hindi with English subtitles / 140 minutes
In this fascinating triptych, a blind photographer, a spiritual guru, and an investment banker—three very different characters—are unknowingly brought together by the unusual topic of organ transplants. Director Anand Ghandi imagines the metaphorical ship (whose constituent parts have each been replaced by new ones) as a human body, using it to initiate inquiry into wide-ranging philosophical and religious themes that are both age-old and important in the 21st century. These connections between strangers come to mediate the contentious relationships between art and reality, between humans and animals, between the third world and the first. An engaging, beautifully-filmed, thoughtfully written and tirelessly humanist film, Ship of Theseus signals one of the brightest directors to emerge in Indian cinema in recent years.
Please note the length of this film. Since we will be starting it at the usual time of 7 p.m., it will finish up close to 9:30.
Sometimes Some People… (Sila Nerangalil Sila Manithargal)
Tuesday, October 21 at 7 p.m.
India / 1976 / in Tamil with English subtitles / 124 minutes
A left-field anomaly of commercial Tamil-language cinema, A. Bhimsingh’s Sometimes Some People… is unusual for its complexity and its thoughtful examination of society. A studious young woman named Ganga is offered a ride by a stranger, who sexually assaults her. Her Brahmin family places the blame on her, disowning her and sending her to live with her aunt and lecherous magistrate uncle. In an alarming twist of fate, she later becomes acquainted with the middle-aged man who raped her, and forms a platonic friendship with him. While this is far from a feminist film, it still touches on many of the difficulties and archaic expectations with which women in contemporary India are burdened. Family life, higher education, religion, literature and patriarchal hypocrisy are all pulped to form the film’s choppy, indie-feeling surface.
Bioscope
Tuesday, October 28 at 7 p.m.
India / 2008 / in Malayalam with English subtitles / 94 minutes
Laden with saturated colors and stately camera motion, this dreamlike film by K. Madhusudharan depicts the transformation that movie magic brings to a small village in Kerala in the early days of cinema. Diwakaran, under the tutelage of a mysterious European named DuPont, brings a film projector back to his hometown, showing the villagers movies by Méliès and Phalke, Griffith and Porter – the whole history of cinema up to World War I all at once. The local people are immediately enthralled by the movies, and begin to project their own ideas, full of magic and superstition, onto this new machine. More than a film about cinema, Bioscope is a treatise on the independence movement in India, how it touched remote villages and was even fed by moving images, bringing the possibility of a native art that could transmit consciousness (with all of its complications in tow).
Preceded by:
Knock-Out
India / 1992 / in Tamil with English subtitles / 18 minutes
This National Film Award-winning short was made by a prolific film editor (and the son of director Bhimsingh), known as B. Lenin. A drunkard discovers an unclaimed corpse in the street and decides it is his duty to give the man a proper burial. Through strange flashbacks and optical effects, we see the dead man’s sometimes unhappy journey to fame and glory as a boxer, and the transformation from youthful hero to anonymous detritus by the wayside.