Changing the World...One Frame at a Time

Once in a while you meet someone or hear about something that somehow makes you feel that at times you can forget the mundane and rise up to something greater.

It happened to me last Wednesday. I met Chiranjeeb and Sunetro. With the regulation Santiniketan jhola, they did look like your regulation coffee-house character. But what they do and preach are anything but regulation.

Chiranjeeb and Sunetro are cine-evangelists, if there is such a term. They run Drishya, a student film study circle set up by a few post-graduates from Calcutta and Jadhavpur University.

Using a hired projector and a clutch of classic VCDs and DVDs, Drishya travels to villages to hold screenings. Yes, rural audiences in West Bengal are congregating in villages to watch world cinema classics unspool before their eyes. Right from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Charles Chaplin’s Great Dictator to Vitorrio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief.

And with each screening, this band of young men and women are shrinking the distance between film-rich Calcutta and the cinema-starved villages of North 24 Parganas, Nadia and Birbhum in interior Bengal. And what's more, they are taking their cine-gospel to the rest of India. Karnataka, Uttaranchal, Gujarat and even cynical, snobbish, cinephiles in Bombay are queueing up for Drishya screenings.

Chiranjeeb says, "Research conducted by our friends showed how electronic media was challenging folk forms. Villagers were abandoning rich folk forms and travelling 12-14 km to see the latest Hindi movies, or hiring VCDs."" To combat crass commercial cinema and offer them more aesthetic choices, Drishya brought along films that were different from Bollywood’s balle-balle wedding galas and divorced-from-reality designer dreams. The group offered organic cinema made by Ray, Ghatak and Godard, whose evocative lyricisms didn’t need sexily picturised songs, heroines in chiffon saris or crude ‘item songs’.

The group began with Ray’s Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, knowing that people would relate to the spoken Bengali. A Bengali cult classic, Goopy, is a fairy tale where the lead pair have the power to conjure food out of thin air. During one evocative scene where Goopy and Bagha shout out for rasogullas, gulab jamuns and puris, "a collective sigh" went through the crowd, recalls Sunetro. "No one missed the theme of starvation, and the fact that soldiers were willing to put down weapons and eat rather than wage wars," adds Chiranjeeb.

Next up was Italian neo-realism, which hit our national theatres in 1953 with Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zameen that told a heart-rending story of debt and then loss of two acres of land through Shambhu, a rickshaw puller, played by Balraj Sahni. Made six years earlier, De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves was thematically similar and Drishya believed audiences would relate to it since rural societies are not yet automobilised. And they did. But not quite how Drishya imagined. While the language (Italian) was no barrier while connecting to the bicycle-theft, a father-son relationship and post-war desperation, most of the audience left after the screening, leaving the Drishya’s team despondent. But ten minutes, they returned, refreshed after tea to ask, "when is the next show?" "That was our first taste of visual victory," says Chiranjeeb.

'Visual victory'. Now that's an expression that we (the handfull in this thingy called the comunication business) toil tooth and nail for every day. Sunetro and Chiranjeeb and the brave men and women at Drishya have proven (albeit with a little help from Ray, Kurosawa, De Sica and a few others!) that visuals, universal emotions have nothing to qworry from the barriers of language!

As a true believer in the power of cinema, I sincerely subscribe to the notion that people like Sunetro and Chiranjeeb are revolutionaries. Revolutionaries aspire to change 'their' world. The word 'their' is important as it means a certain immediate hinterland, as opposed to an utopian Neverland. And their instrument of change is good cinema. More power to them.

Drishya is a non-profit organisation is looking for all the help they need, monetary and otherwise. To get in touch with them, email drishya_films@yahoo.com.