A dream uncanned: Uday Shankar's 1948 film 'Kalpana'

Uday Shankar’s 1948 film Kalpana, restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cine Foundation, was screened Friday night at Cannes. It was a mesmerising tale narrated through dance, relevant to this day, writes Aniruddha Guha, who attended the screening and spoke to filmmakers watching this old Indian film at this premier international festival.

In 1940s Bombay, a dance troupe has just delivered its first performance to a rousing reception from the audience. Later, the show’s financier demands money from the director. The director is appalled. “In fact, you must pay me money. We worked for free, and the show was a success!” The financier laughs. “You know how much I spent on publicity? The marketing cost me a bomb, plus theatre rentals aren’t cheap.” The director doesn’t get economics; he doesn’t care about marketing. All he cares about is the need to keep his art alive, and to communicate with audiences without bowing to commercial pulls.

This scene from Indian classical dance legend Uday Shankar’s Kalpana (1948) was created and shot long before Hindi cinema became the money-churning industry it is today. And as we continue to struggle to find a middle path between commercial entertainment and meaningful cinema, we can relate to Kalpana which dealt with the need for art to survive in an increasingly consumerist world.

Most people who trooped into the Salle Bunuel theatre at the Palais — the venue of the 65th Cannes Film Festival — had come for a taste of a “classic Bollywood film”. A French sound designer told me before the screening that he was curious to see what “Bollywood was like in the ‘40s”. Kalpana, of course, had nothing ‘Bollywood-y’ about it. Compared to mainstream Hindi films featuring the likes of Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar around that time, Kalpana had an off-beat theme, about a dancer who struggles to open, and sustain, a cultural centre that fosters various art forms.

Kalpana’s autobiographical plot is interspersed with scenes from an imaginary world (kalpana) that exists only in the mind of the dancer. After a point, reality intertwines with the surreal (even for the audience), and it becomes difficult to separate one from the other. It is narrated almost entirely in dance form, with no less than 82 dance sequences piecing the film together. 

India’s earliest indie
Kalpana has been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the philanthropic endeavour started by the legendary filmmaker to save vintage films from around the world. “You will see,” Scorsese said in a short video clip before the movie began, “that the great work of hallucinatory, homemade expressionism and ecstatic beauty doesn’t just include dance sequences... but whose primary physical vocabulary is dance (sic).”

Scorsese’s personal interest in the film could be driven by what it stands for. The story is narrated by a scriptwriter to a film producer looking for a commercial potboiler. The harrowed scriptwriter is eventually kicked out, and blames money-thirsty producers for the decline of art in society. The film opens with the shot of a signboard that says, “Box office is God” in the producer’s office, something that amused the large number of film professionals present at the screening.  

The film is a true indie, and probably India’s first (even Hollywood films are scoffed at in a scene). Shankar financed the film himself, and the storytelling technique was unique. The dances have a mesmeric quality, the unconventional choreography and the picturisation creating a dreamlike ambience. A brilliant sequence in the film shows how men have gone from using machines for the purpose of development to turning into machines themselves. At 155 minutes, though, the many dance pieces might seem repetitive, and Shankar seemed to have wanted to pack in a little too much of it.

At several points, I was reminded of Pina, Wim Wenders’ crafty documentary on dancer Pina Bausch, which opened to worldwide critical acclaim last year. The documentary is more or less made up of dance pieces by other dancers of Bausch’s troupe, the narrative surprisingly similar to the one adopted by Shankar almost 70 years ago. A Belgian filmmaker present in the crowd saw the connect too. “Pina’s considered to be groundbreaking by many, but to think this film was conteptualised so many years earlier is such a revelation. The dance sequences were a window to an India didn’t know much about.”

At the end of the film, the audience gave a standing ovation to the film, with shouts of “Bravo!” directed at Amala Shankar, the film’s heroine and Shankar’s wife, present in the audience. “At 93, I am the youngest film star you have at Cannes this year,” an emotional Amala told the audience. “We Indians believe in the concept of rebirth, and I feel I have taken a number of births to have got the chance to stand on this stage tonight, on an occasion like this. This is all the more special because this is the country where I met Uday when I was 11 years old.”