Art & Entertainment

No Place For A Past

A film society Ray co-founded will see death by a life insurance company

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No Place For A Past
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The rickety wooden door, fra­ying at the edges, is painted a pale yellow, the very colour of faded memory. Above it hangs an unassuming, unpolished wooden nameplate, almost like a forgotten souve­nir, barely visible in the dim light of the narrow corridor of a crumbling Calcutta mansion. Peer closely and you make out the legend inscribed on it: Calcutta Film Soci­ety. The very same CFS, indeed, the famed film fraternity, which Satyajit Ray and his close friend and renowned film critic Chidananda Dasgupta founded with others on October 5, 1947.

Seventy years later, past its prime in that Golden Age of Bengali cinema, the country’s oldest film club lies in a serious state of disrepair, clinging desperately to the last signs of life. On most days, you’ll find the door locked. On the rare occasions it opens, usually a Saturday when a film screening is due, you walk into a 250 square foot room, the setting sun casting a chiaroscuro as it streams in through the large glass windows. One side is lined with ceiling-high glass door bookcases crammed with old photographs, magazines and pamphlets dating back to the days of Ray, the other has  posters from world cinema. A third wall has a covered shelf on which stands a projector. The blank wall opposite is the screen.

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Once upon a time, this was the hub of regular private film screenings ending in debate and discussion. Today, there is only silence. Once it opened the world of cinema to audiences; today, with the onslau­ght of multiplexes and digitised video discs, it looks like an anachronism. Last month, another nail was driven into its coffin when the owners of the premises, the Life Insurance Corporation of India, ser­ved it an eviction notice. Their justification? The club had defaulted on rent payment.

CFS had taken the present premises on rent a few years after it came into existence, and after several revisions over the years (at an approximate rate of 35 per cent), they pay Rs 1,500 a month right now. There is an arrear of close to Rs 3 lakh, according to LIC. They have also increased the rent to Rs 4,500. CFS admits that there might have been lapses in payment but says it can’t pay the rent LIC is now asking for as it’s a cultural centre, not a profit-making organisation. The society has 300 members who pay a membership fee of Rs 100 per year. “All we are asking for is some preferential treatment,” says CFS working president Pra­dipta Sen, “considering this society is a heritage one, providing cultural service to the public and should be viewed in light of what it stands for and not equated with an ordinary rent payer charged at the market rate.”

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Sepia Memory Mrinal Sen with CFS members at ‘Calcutta 71’ inaugural show

Samik Bandyopadhyay, author, publi­sher and CFS member, agrees. “The role of CFS or other film clubs was not limited to being mere film theatres for private screenings though it indeed had been the first of its kind to do so in the country,” he says. Film clubs have also provided platforms for discourse on cinema, shared exp­eri­e­n­ce and exchange of ideas. It is this that has enabled it to retain a certain relevance even as digitisation advances at breakneck speed. With DVDs, available for individual home viewing, seeing films in small gatherings at clubs has, in some eyes, become largely outdated.

Bandyopadhay, who was in college when he first joined the film society in 1955, the same year that Ray made Pather Panchali, recalls the initial days of CFS as a time of “great intellectual interest in international cinema”. Its fascinating history dates back to the time when newly independent India, eager to feast on something else besides the Hollywood staple it had been fed, was keen on exploring other—mainly European—cinema. The world wars had destroyed Europe’s studios, and an alternative kind of cin­ema—‘arthouse’, low budget—was emer­ging. Ita­lian director Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief, for instance, was shot entirely on the streets. “Ray was very inspired by Bicycle Thief. He thought, ‘If this film can be made on this kind of a budget, why can’t I do it too?” says Bandyopadhyay.

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LIC’s move now has dismayed society members, which include the illustrious descendants of the founding fathers, Ray’s son, filmmaker Sandip Ray, and Dasgupta’s daughter, actress-filmmaker Aparna Sen. “It is a pity it has come to this,” says Ray. “That room has a lot of history. It is a heritage room. We have all signed a letter urging the concerned authorities to rethink the matter and are keeping our fingers crossed.” Sen, who has been at the forefront of a movement to revive CFS since 2011, calls LIC’s decision “very sad”. It was at her Calcutta home, when she was a little girl of about 10, that the first screenings of CFS were held before the Chittaranjan Avenue premises. “The films were shown on an 8 mm screen on the verandah of our house,” she tells Outlook,” she says. “I rem­ember watching so many films. Battleship Potem­kin (Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 Russ­ian classic), Ivan the Terrible, The Passion of Joan of Arc.... We were introdu­ced to world cinema through CFS. Though we were children, we were not stopped from watching even adult movies.”

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Director Mrinal Sen, who was one of the co-founders of the society, too has lent his name to the campaign against LIC’s move. The 94-year- old is ailing, but says he is so disturbed by the turn of events that he had to act. His is the first signature on the letter addressed to the LIC director. When Outlook contacted Sen, he confirmed that the matter has caused him “immense distress” and agreed that there is a need for more effort to preserve Calcutta’s cinematic heritage. Have they thought of any other venue to set up the film club in case they are evicted? “That is not possible. We have a huge collection of books, magazines and other periodicals, most of which have great significance because they were Ray’s,” says Pradipta Sen. “We have at least a thousand books in the archives and other documents. Some of these are old and have become brittle with age. They will get destroyed if we try to move them.”

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For other CFS members, the space is sacrosanct because it was set up by Ray. In any other country, they say, such heritage buildings and institutions would be preserved and promoted by the government, not be allowed to rot because of non-payment of rent. Other corporates and educational institutions are ready to host the CFS and preserve its archives, but the members say it will not be the same.

“We can rent any other space, but it will not be the same,” says Pradipta Sen. There could still be a way out. He says that after Mrinal Sen’s letter reached the LIC director in Mumbai, they have been less hostile. Won’t it be strange, after all, were a life ins­urance company sound the death knell for a society which gave birth to Bengal’s all-important ‘living picture’ culture?

By Dola Mitra in Calcutta

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