Moving Images

The fervour is allowed to seep unchecked into the films as well. Avikunthak’s latest offering—a 22-minute short film titled Vakratunda Swaha—will be exhibited at Chatterjee & Lal till June 17. The world premiere of Vakratunda Swaha was held at the Colaba gallery on Thursday. The film will be showcased along with eight film stills and a quartet of short films titled Etcetera made by Avikunthak between 1994 and 1998.

“Today there is so much of crossover in terms of media that it was only natural for us to exhibit the works of a film artist,” says Mortimer Chatterjee,co-owner of the gallery. He describes Avikunthak as a stalwart who,despite having a stoic presence in the international film circuit,hasn’t been heard enough in India.

Vakratunda Swaha begins as a requiem to friend and artist,late Girish Dahiwale (who committed suicide in 1998),and metamorphosises into an “existential inquiry into the idea of death”.

“Sometime in 1997,Girish,Riyas (Komu),Justin (Ponmany) and I decided we would write a manifesto together—a critique of the commercialisation of art in Mumbai. We would meet on and off at the JJ (School of Art),or at the Bandra hostel and sometimes at my kholi in Dharavi,” reminisces Avikunthak about his early days as an artist. The manifesto never materialised but Avikunthak did succeed in getting a two-minute shoot of Dahiwale submerging a Ganpati idol in the sea on Anant Chaturdashi. It remained in the recesses of his mind until the following year when he heard of Dahiwale’s death. “Almost immediately,I was aware that I had this footage. A real memory.”

If Indian Cinema can be compartmentalised into mainstream commercial,social and political documentaries and cinema of poetry/philosophy,Avikunthak belongs to the third segment. Even more specifically,he calls his genre of filmmaking the “cinema of religiosity”.

The strain of religiosity and his fetish with rituals are most apparent in three of his films—Etcetera,Kalighat Fetish (shot in his home in Kolkata and the nearby Kali temple) and Vakratunda Swaha.

Although it seems to have deeply influenced his filmmaking,Avikunthak dismissively shrugs off his childhood years in Kolkata. (He now divides his time between New Haven,USA,and Kolkata).

“I had a very normal childhood,neither dramatic nor traumatic. In Kolkata,you do politics,fall in love,write bad poetry,watch cinema and theatre. I did all of that.”

As in all his previous films,there is no cohesive thread of narrative in Vakratunda Swaha but it is rather a dense cacophony of imagery and symbolism. “I’m not a storyteller,” clarifies Avikunthak. “What I’m doing is thinking through ideas cinematically.”

His film certainly sets the cogs of the mind spinning and leaves you with questions you don’t really know how to ask. But the greatest residue of Vakratunda Swaha is a tenuous sense of disquiet. As though someone has hacked away at the pieces of a larger narrative and now they no longer fit into neatly allotted slots.