Even as the revelries surrounding the 100 years of Indian cinema touched a high pitch in the last few months,experimental cinema the lesser-screened side of it remained out of focus. Now,bringing a sense of completion to the commemoration,a film festival organised by Films Division,Mumbai attempts to showcase these cinematic works. Hundred Years of Experimentation: A Retrospective of Indian cinema and video will trace the roots and the evolution of Indian experimental cinema through 100 years in a three-day long retrospective that will feature 50 films. There have been grotesque forms of celebrations of Indian popular cinema,whereas there is a robust experimentation in cinema that has gone unnoticed and needs to be celebrated, says Ashish Avikunthak,who has curated the festival along with Pankaj Rishi Kumar. The festival opens on June 28. The schedule of the festival,organised by the Films Division and to be held at its premises in Mumbai,has divided films across genres and formats,which include features,shorts,fiction,apart from documentaries,animations and video installations in gallery spaces. The festival opens with the screening of first full-fledged Indian film,Dadasaheb Phalkes Raja Harishchandra. Though in retrospect this is considered to be a popular film,the festival curators see it as a starting point of experimentation in Indian cinema. So how did the two popular and experimental take vastly different routes from its common genesis? Cinema at that time wasnt about entertainment,people watched Raja Harishchandra for the same reasons they went for a pilgrimage,or to the temple. And it is an experiment because Phalke was the first person to tell an Indian tale through the modern apparatus of cinema,which till then had been passed on through oral traditions,visuals and writings, says Avikunthak,who is an experimental filmmaker and assistant professor of Film Media at the University of Rhode Island. A session called Experiment with Gods,celebrates the religious cinema of the silent era. From a medium of devotional engagement,cinema went on to garner mass popularity with the arrival of the talkies that carried forward the song-and-dance tradition of India. The next wave of experimentation came 50 years later. This was facilitated by government bodies like Films Division (FD) in the late 60s and later,the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC). This phase marked the arrival of the state-funded film which produced some of the most ambitious experiments. S. Sukhdevs documentary film in 1967 called India 67 is one such film. Till date,it remains one of the radically experimental documentary films ever made in India, says Avikunthak. In the later years,cinematic experimentation moved to Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) under the radical vision of Ritwik Ghatak,who mentored some of the big names in the field there. The Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI) also produced more of such works. The later experiments came with digitisation,animation and video installations in gallery spaces. The festival puts a special emphasis on films that have been born out of an Indian ethos rather than the western idea of the experimental cinema. These films,with roots in ancient Indian philosophies will be screened in a category called Cinema Prayoga. The Indian sense of time and space is different from that of the West. The latter is often more linear and the narrative converges to a climactic end; whereas the Indian idea of time is more cyclical as indicated in the Jain philosophies of samaya and the multiple perspectives as shown in the Mughal miniature paintings, says Amrit Gangar,a film historian who co-curated the section.
