The Film Festival Documents
Through an array of materials whose variety and range are remarkable, the Pearson collection documents the institutions that staged cinema, Indian and foreign, art and commercial, for audiences within India and overseas in the 1970s.
The most extensive documentation pertains to five editions of the International Film Festival of India, organized by the Indian government (1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, and 1980). Among more than hundred delegates who attended in 1977 were Canadian experimental filmmaker Joyce Wieland, Hong Kong producer Run Run Shaw of Shaw Brothers, Akira Kurasawa (Japan), Michaelangelo Antonioni (Italy), Sumitra and Lester Peries (Sri Lanka), and Elia Kazan and Martin Scorcese (both from USA).
Indian American filmmaker Krishna Shah was present with his film River Niger (1977) along with his actors Cecily Tyson and James Earl Jones.
The 1979 festival jury was chaired by famed Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, and included celebrated filmmakers Belgian Chantal Akerman, Hungarian Márta Mészáros, Indian Mrinal Sen, and Chilean Miguel Littin as jury members. Pictured below are the front and back sides of the Press Information Bureau photograph depicting Sembène awarding Indian filmmaker Girish Karnad as Information and Broadcasting Minister L.K. Advani looks on (Karnad's film won Best Feature, and Best Actor for actor Shankar Nag, who is not pictured below but is mentioned in the caption notes).
A diverse bunch of eminent figures cutting across reigning distinctions of "first world" and "third world", Hollywood cinema, European auteur (“art”) cinema, and the political radicalism of Latin American "Third Cinema", shared the space of the same event in New Delhi.
The Film and Television Institute of India's director Jagat Murari wrote in the 1978 festival bulletin (page pictured below) that the "interaction of the international festival with the national cinema can be likened only to a nuclear explosion both in its shattering impact and subsequent remoulding of our own cinema. After exposure to world classics...conceptually different and original and technically superior, it is difficult to continue in the old rut."
Murari's comments reveal the aspiration behind organizing film festivals, present since the first festival in 1952 when many Indian filmmakers encountered a new strain of neorealism in Italian cinema, to add to a preexisting Left-Progressive one within India. The comments also speak to the taste hierarchies that dictated Indian elites' (filmic and bureaucratic) perceptions of their own cinema. These perceptions were contentious. In the 1975 festival, a symposium on "parallel cinema", another term for art cinema, had led to a walkout by art filmmakers and newspaper critics because one of the sessions was chaired by B.R. Chopra, the commercial Hindi filmmaker whose indifference to "abstract films" had irked art filmmakers. The symposium finds a passing reference in this collection in the transcript of a talk by critic Kiranmoy Raha who had been present at that event.
Such contentiousness spoke to the way the decade’s understandings of “new cinema” were themselves fractious and diverse. Some filmmakers such as Shyam Benegal and Adoor Gopalakrishnan (whose films are represented in this collection either as brochures or publicity stills; see the admission card for a screening of Gopalakrishnan’s Swayamvaram/One’s Own Choice, 1972, Malayalam) embraced the tradition of cinematic realism.
By contrast, filmmaker Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta Trilogy incorporated the political-modernist formal methods of Argentinian Third Cinema proponents (documentary voiceover, intellectual montage editing techniques, still photography, captions, densely textual intertitles, and so on).
In still further contrast, avant-gardist filmmaker Kumar Shahani’s embrace and incorporation of South Asian myth as a device for a critical interrogation of the present, is represented here in the transcript of a talk delivered by him at a Festival symposium (see below) and can be affined with filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak, whose films are represented in this collection in posters.
Present in the Pearson collection is a set of six symposium papers delivered on the topic “Filmmaker’s Purpose: Personal Cinema or Social Relevance” at the 1977 film festival. One speaker characterized “third world” cinema as a form of “developmental journalism” for its attention to factual social problems. The documentarian S. Sukhdev, who embraced Soviet montage techniques, and whose style was more polemical than factual, argued categorically: “There should not be a cinema, personal or otherwise, without social relevance”. By contrast, Avant Garde filmmaker Kumar Shahani rejected both the “superabundant” worlds of commercial cinema, and “facts” that are “staged” in realist art cinema uncritically: “it is practice that constitutes culture, not illusion”, argued Shahani, advocating for a filmmaking practice alert to the contradictions in material reality. Talks such as these are replete with international references, from the French Revolution to Pushkin to Andy Warhol to abstract expressionism. Lyle Pearson, the donor of the collection exhibited here, was present at this symposium: “Mr. Lyle Pearson felt that 16mm films are commercially more viable and will have much greater impact on the audiences”, reported the 6-page summary of the symposium.
Between 1968 and 1974, the government-run Film Finance Corporation (FFC) had enormous success in funding and generating a refreshing cycle of “new cinema” or “parallel cinema” films. But the political Emergency (1975-1977), which finds no direct mention in these documents, had already ushered in a new discourse among bureaucrats of “commercial prudence” and “economic usefulness”. Jagdish Parikh, Chairman of FFC in this period bluntly stated: "We don't believe in parallel cinema because parallel lines never meet".