Cinema, mon amour

This is to remind myself, that Cinema, I love you still.

I might now prefer blogging than holding a video camera. I might have given up dreams of ever making my feature film. And sometimes I may wonder how I have forgotten the names of the films and the filmmakers I so passionately talked about, under the wisdom tree.

Where did I go wrong, I wonder. What was the name of the thing I left behind in the Film Institute? Why does it evade me now? Does it not like Bombay, or television, or video? It does disappear totally from my heartmind when I make documentary films, the commissioned variety.

The ones we used to see in theaters before the feature film began. Not like the ones Rao saab, our editing teacher showed us. In which there are yards and yards of footage of a boy sitting in a boat lazily sailing over a placid lake.

Now, ofcourse, I dare not keep a shot that long. If I make a film about cycling, it should not show too many cyclists just cycling. Make them say something, no. If I make a film on farming, why use the sunrise? The sun takes far too long to rise. Yes, the colours change, but so what? Is that the point one is trying to make here?

Is it the point? A film on photosynthesis? Why do you want to show the kid playing with a leaf?
Ah, it comes to me! It's name ! What I left behind in the Insti! It is antipoint! No such name exists? Oh well...

God, if you did not want me to use it, why did you give me a right brain? Said I, till a few years passed and my sweetheart of a husband, the nerd, introduced me to blogging! No more producers shitting on the head, but old beaux's commenting, hey I didn't know you are an artist! So what if this doesn't pay, I am willing to starve, so hungry for creation and appreciation am I.

And thus it happens, slowly, that instead of that cut, instead of the light, its the word, the idea, the sentence that I mix in my morning cup of tea.

However subtle, there is an inner unveiling that takes place when one continues to express without fear of judgment.

Why else, did I suddenly remember, a cut today, maybe a decade after I cut it?

The name of the film is, 'And so flows the Indrayani.'

Indrayani is the river that flows, mainly for Tukaram, the poet saint from Maharashtra. The story goes that Tukaram was an absent minded, lost to bliss godmad character. In times of poverty, read joblessness, he was offered to stand guard in a corn field, to shoo away birds who flocked to munch the ripe corn.

Our poet-saint, he did his job. Tukaram composed the bhajan, 'Adhi beeja ekle. Beeja ankireley, rope vadhile,' ( in the beginning, was one seed, it sprouted, and there was a tree), while the sparrows finished off the entire corn.

None of this features in the film, 'And so flows...' But it has a shot, of a couple of sparrows sitting on an upturned piece of corn hanging in Tukaram's temple doorway. The background score is a varkari singing a bhajan, in the temple by the river. One sparrow flies off, maybe to her little ones, to feed them some corn. Then she comes back, and both the sparrows peck the corn. This editor does not cut the shot till both sparrows have eaten their full and flown away, out of the frame.