Abha Dhulia, Shama Zaidi, Shyam Benegal, Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Naseeruddin Shah, Preeti Sagar & Prahlad Kakkar at Eros Cinema Mumbai for the premiere of restored version of Manthan on June 1, 2024.
It is almost 45 years old. The subtle but elegantly framed reprint of renowned Dutch painter Rembrandt’s famous work Night Watch hangs in my modest living room in suburban Mumbai today. When the reprint was gifted to my father decades ago the chiaroscuro lighting was sharp with yellow highlights crisp, and the blacks fully loaded. The high contrast was in perfect place. Today what hangs on my living room wall is a pale version of what the reprint was when procured from Amsterdam. It often fills me with sadness especially when the digital world is loaded with sharp images of major works of art.
Realism, Baroque and Renaissance have a close association with the cinematography of Govind Nihalani and the works of Shyam Benegal whose 1976 film Manthan was recently restored and released by the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF). It was an initiative of FHF founder-director Shivendra Singh Dungarpur who in recent past got his organization to restore Aravindan Govindan’s Kummatty, Thamp̄ and Aribam Syam Sharma’s Ishanou. Manthan’s restored version had its world premiere at the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival in the presence of Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak Shah and Smita Patil’s son Prateik Babbar. It was later released in 50 cities across India in collaboration with PVR and Cinepolis over the weekend of 1st and 2nd June,2024.
Founder-Director of Film Heritage Foundation Shivendra Singh Dungarpur with Shyam Benegal
Fading color and light in a work of art is something confronted by art forms other than painting, like photography and cinema. Time wears things down and every work of art is not fortunate enough to be restored. Manthan was. My desire to see the restored version of the film had a deeper connection than the fading Rembrandt on my wall. It is India’s first crowdfunded film, made by a contribution of Rs. 2/- from 5,00,000 farmers of Gujarat associated with the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. The film was an initiative of the father of White Revolution in India Verghese Kurien. My own first feature Ek Betuke Aadmi Ki Afrah Raatein (The Joyous Nights of a Ridiculous Man) was a crowdfunded film largely and somewhere the seeds of this route for making an independent film were sown in my childhood by Manthan. The connection with Manthan was umblical. Therefore, Manthan had to be seen all over again.
While the Indian premiere was held on the 1st of June at the newly renovated Eros Cinema in Churchgate, Mumbai, others bought tickets and saw the film at various multiplexes in the city and around the country. The premiere was well attended by Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani the cinematographer of the film who was also closely associated with the restoration process, Shama Zaidi, Naseeruddin Shah, Preeti Sagar, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and of course Shivendra and other film artists, officialdoms, scholars and critics.
When I arrived at PVR Icon at Infinity Mall, Versova in suburban Mumbai I was thrilled to see the theatre slowly reach a full house. No mean achievement for a film that was made in the realist tradition 48 years ago with Girish Karnad, Smita Patil, Naseeruddin Shah, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Mohan Agashe, Anant Nag, Sadhu Meher, Abha Dhulia and Salim Ghouse, all leading lights of the so-called Hindi parallel cinema. Unfortunately, most of them are not there with us today. But the theatre was full of film lovers, practitioners from the world of OTT, television, film students and makers.
A packed Eros theatre
The lights were switched off and Manthan started. The print was absolutely crystal clear and the colors restored to what they must have been in 1976. The restored print has a title before the film starts that informs us of the kind and extent of damage the original print had. What unfurled on the big screen was nothing like that. The reds and greens could be seen with correct saturation and the sky had that perfect blue to it. There was no bleeding of colors at all. Not that I could notice. The biggest achievement of whatever technique FHF adopted to restore the print was, the “fake” sanitized crispness of the digital image was not there in my view. The latitude that celluloid could offer to a print seemed almost there in the restored version. Though I am neither a cinematographer nor have any clue on restoration processes, as a maker I could yet feel it was a celluloid film and not some data on my hard disc that was being projected, for which the word “film” was just a euphemism. It took me back to my student days at FTII, of smelling and feeling a film reel in hand.
The Film Heritage Foundation was established by Shivendra a decade ago in 2014 and since then it is the only non-governmental organization that is dedicated to film preservation, collection of rare prints, memorabilia, training programs and workshops. The Foundation is recognized by film luminaries from across the world and as diverse as Amitabh Bachchan and Martin Scorsese.
All I can recall is Shivendra, an FTII alumnus wanting to make a biopic on Guru Dutt had started to work on a film on PK Nair, the founder-director of the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune, a pioneer in the field of film archiving, that resulted in Shivendra’s first film The Celluloid Man. This was followed by a film on the Czech New Wave master Jìří Menzel and Slovak New Wave cinema, CzechMate: In Search of Jìří Menzel, an 8-hour odyssey. I must confess I am guilty of not seeing both these very important films till today! I am certain that proximity to a stalwart like Nair saab, and the bureaucratic lethargy at the film archive in Pune is what inspired Shivendra to start FHF which is now doing a very important service to the art of cinema.
Coming back to Manthan’s crowdfunding and co-operative movement in India, I clearly remember closely studying the co-operative movements across the world in the field of cinema and otherwise inspired by Manthan’s crowdfunding and Malayalam filmmaker John Abraham’s Odessa Collective in Kerala. In the eighties the co-operative route seemed to be a route that was free of both the market forces and State patronage and would belong to the people. So, a film like Manthan sometimes can have far reaching significance than just their aesthetic merit. No wonder after two feature films, both supported by friends and family watching Manthan was mandatory to revisit an era gone by and look for connections to our times today.
The video recording of the Mumbai premiere of Manthan:
It was nostalgic for sure. It seemed to belong to what now looks like the “age of innocence”, for the churnings have become far more complex and cynical in a changed world order. Once upon a time there was idealism and hope. One should not forget that the films of Shyam Benegal and actors like Naseeruddin Shah (Bhola of Manthan), a prototype of the “angry young man” persona of Amitabh Bachchan happened at a time when Bachchan was ruling the marquee. For every Shabana Azmi and Smita Patil there was a Rekha and Zeenat Aman or Parveen Babi, riding on big budget productions of Hindi melodramas. Therefore their importance and success in the parallel universe cannot be undermined. Often the budget of these films was less than the fee of a single star of a big budget film. Add to that the lethargy of organizations like the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC) in distributing these films, which made access of the audience to these films very difficult. They were really no match to the Bollywood star vehicles.
The film also seemed to be a critique of sorts of the Nehruvian model, despite Shyam Benegal being a Nehru admirer. He adapted his autobiography Discovery of India into a television series for Doordarshan. Girish Karnad’s character of Dr. Rao modelled on Verghese Kurien is a westernized outsider completely unaware of the village dynamics of caste and class, and what a challenge it can pose to his utopian idea of setting up a milk cooperative. Who will control the cooperative for instance? How the membership of the cooperative committee and chairperson will be determined with caste being a major deciding factor etc. Dr Rao, maybe sensitive to these fault lines but is alien to them as well and ill-equipped to handle them. Therefore, he must leave. The Nehruvian harbinger of hope leaves disappointed, and it is only Benegal’s neo-realist influenced social realism that instils hope as a child becomes the first member of the cooperative when it is restarted by Bhola (Naseeruddin Shah), an akkarmashi, child born to a lower caste woman from an upper caste man. No wonder Girish Karnad was the chosen one for his celebrated play Tughluk is considered a scathing criticism of Nehru.
To Benegal’s credit he not only uses caste politics as the main trigger of conflict ultimately but also dwells on gender, albeit subtly. The neglect of Bindu (Smita Patil) by her husband, her attraction towards Dr. Rao, who too ignores her once his wife arrives enumerates that gender is a separate battle beyond caste and class. Even Dr Rao’s wife is alienated from him and his dream project and her discomfort is addressed by Dr. Rao by giving her sex, with or without pleasure is not something Benegal dwells on.
As mentioned earlier Manthan goes beyond its celluloid life hence its restoration is so significant. No wonder both Benegal and Nihalani, the most important person in the process of restoration being the cinematographer are so happy about it. Govind Nihalani said, “Having been involved in the restoration of ‘Manthan’ and seen the painstaking effort that Film Heritage Foundation has put in over many months to ensure that the restoration is as true to the original work as possible, I cannot wait to watch the film back on the big screen, the way it should be watched and to see the work that Shyam and I envisioned nearly fifty years ago come back to life again.”
Shyam Benegal & Govind Nihalani at the Manthan screening in Eros Cinema, Mumbai.
And Shyam Benegal added, “Manthan” will be the first restoration of one of my films that will have a theatrical release. When ‘Manthan’ released in 1976, it was a great success as the farmers themselves came to see the film in droves, travelling in bullock carts from small towns and villages. I hope that 48 years later when the restored film comes back to the big screen this June, people across India will come to the cinema to watch the film.” Audience was indeed there.
Naseeruddin Shah who essayed the role of Bhola, the ever-skeptical young man from the lower caste and was present in Cannes for the screening said, “Watching the restored ‘Manthan’ at its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival was a very emotional experience for me. I was overwhelmed by memories from almost fifty years ago when cinema was a vehicle of change and moved to tears by the standing ovation at the end, which was not just for myself but for the film which has more than stood the test of time and for the beauty of the restoration.”
For Shivendra, the Founder-Director of Film Heritage Foundation it was the joy and excitement of the people watching the film where it is supposed to be watched, in theatres. He says, “When Film Heritage Foundation takes up the restoration of a film it is with the aim of bringing it back to the public for which it was made. I am so pleased that audiences across the country in cities ranging from the big metros like Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai to smaller cities like Dharwad, Kakinada, Nadiad, Bhatinda, Panipat and Kozhikode will have the opportunity to watch the beautifully restored film.” Imagine a 48-year-old film, not so mainstream being watched in a theatre in Bhatinda? Priceless! everything else money can buy, as they say!!!
Sharad Raj is a Mumbai based independent filmmaker, Senir Faculty at Whistling Woods International & Editor of Just Cinema.
Comments