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5 Responses to “Kundan Shah Retrospective”

1. Deepak Srinivasan on November 29th, 2006 10:54 pm

   The war wages on, mainstream and “offbeat” honest indian cinema…I was quite the supporter of the alternate movement and still continue to be.Genuine experiments happen far away from the big-wigs, or so i believe.
   recently, a thought struck me though…I was at the MMB indo-Zerrman film festival gulping down national award genres of indian cinema, truly thrilled, but by the end of the exercise, i couldnt help but notice that trends set in everywhere…whatever identity one assumes, there seems to be an archetype…and amongst filmamkers who depict meaningful cinema, there’s what I observed, the capitialisation on women and thir issues in socio-policital contexts..nevertheless told in a particularly unique style, some hackneyed passive struggles for freedom, some hopeful, taking a gigantic leap out of reality to reach for empowerment…yet, the woman and her stories in myriad avtars of indian culture and community….three sisters also seems to lean toward tthe genre….the sensitive filmmaker is always a feminist? or is he?
   remains to be seen, Kundan’s film is something I want to see and find out…
   apart from that of course, my ex-roomate who held on dearly to Shah’s other thought provoking film VHS tapes…
   with their unique black humor, feather-light and airy…
   nostalgia factor…my days in the US…
   Deepak

2. tushar on November 30th, 2006 4:25 am

   @ Deepak: don’t know much about the inclination of Kundan Shah’s films, but his last few films do tend to suggest a feminist angle. I read that Dil Hai Tumhara was written by Raj Kumar Santoshi! And he was supposed to direct it first; it was in turn inspired by another film from the west. I personally feel he lost it after KHKN. He gives reasons like succumbing to the pressures of a big production house. However, what amuses me is that a big prodn houses only hire you for what you are good at, whereas in case of a kya kehna or dil hai tumhara, one hardly saw the vintage Kundan Shah.

   The brief on three sisters looks interesting….

   More on him:

   Kundan Shah

   Date of Birth- 19th October `1947

   1973–76 Diploma in direction from FTII, Pune

   1979 Assisted Saeed Mirza “Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Atta Hai”

   1979 Assisted Robin Dharamraj: “Chakra”

   1980 Assisted in Production for Vinod Chopra’s “Sazaye Maut”

   1981 “Vision of the Blind” – A documentary for Films Division

   1982-83 Directed comedy: “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro”

   1984 National Award for “Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro”

   1984 Conceived and co-directed TV Serial “Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi”

   1985-89 Codirected TV
   serials “Nukkad”; “Manoranjan”; “Intezaar”; “Kathasagar”; “Wagle Ki
   Duniya”; “Circus”, “Main Abhi Jawan Hoon”, “Mrs Madhuri Dixit”

   One hour docudramas on drug addiction for Bharat Petroleum: 1) Manas;
   2) Sankalp

   1992-93 Directed feature: “Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa”

   1994 Filmfare Critics’ Award for KHKN

   1996 Directed for ABCL “Loveria” - Not Released

   1997-2000 Directed “Hum To Mohabbat Karega”

   Directed `Kya Kehna”

   2001 Directed “Dil Hai Tumhara”

   2004 Directed “Ek Se Badhkar Ek”

   2005 Directed “The Three Sisters”

   ===========================

   King of satire dons a serious cap
   30th July 2005 17.33 IST
   By Agencies

   What happens when the king of satire dons a serious cap? “Three
   Sisters”, a movie based on the Kanpur suicides of 1988 and other
   dowry deaths by Kundan Shah , the man behind cult comedy “Jaane Bhi
   Do Yaron”.

   The film traces the last six hours of three girls, before they end
   their lives due to their parents’ inability to pay up dowry. “It’s a
   fictionalized account. The wounds were too raw to speak to the
   families.” However, Shah is optimistic that the movie will bring
   about a change in mindsets . If the applause and moist eyes during
   the screenings at the 7th Osian Film Festival are anything to go by,
   the message was well received, he says.

   So what was the most disturbing fact that came up in the
   research? “Loads of them. 2000 suicides related to dowry occur every
   year. Also, sex detection is possible through blood and within a week
   of pregnancy female foetuses are killed, even in urban India.” Shah
   points out.

   “It may seem silly in Delhi, but women who work are considered a
   stigma and unmarried girls of a certain age are a legitimate object
   of lust.” Shot on a shoestring budget of less than a crore, Shah
   claims that it is perhaps the only Indian movie ever with three women
   as protagonists. Amrita Subhash, Shiju Kataria and Kadambari Kadam
   play the three sisters driven by their parents and societal attitudes
   to take the drastic step.

   He is optimistic of a theatrical release though it has been made for
   a television channel. So does he see it as a climb down? “No, I still
   take one shot, just that I use eight cameras,” he quips. He may have
   made the hugely popular `Nukkad’, `Circus’ and `Yeh jo hai Zindagi’
   but believes that serials are repetitive. He does admit his bias
   towards the silver screen.

   Link:-

   http://www.apunkachoice.com/scoop/bollywood/20050730-2.html

3. Deepak Srinivasan on December 3rd, 2006 10:56 pm

   Kundan Shah’s “the three sisters”, Review

   No, not the mythic goddesses of dhan, vidya and shakti but quite the ironic contrary, Teen Behnein is a film about impoverished three sisters, painfully journeying through the day in their lives that is their planned last…

   Kundan Shah in his introduction said that he hopes this film will bring at least one target viewer to her senses and avert the crime from happening; the technique he uses to facilitate this is a mixture of both realism and fictional hopefulness. It proved to be an effective use of the medium to communicate the problem, though I have some issues with treatment, which I will raise a little later. However, it was a unique film experience as a result of having had, amongst the audiences, women who belonged to the NGO sector, many who were in touch with the reality of the situation. A heated debate about the reality of the situation, the crux of the problem, intellectualization of issues and gender mud-slinging, amongst many other revelations I think was the entirety of the experience of the issue for me. Polarization of sorts that instantly resulted, men trying to be cheeky and patriarchal, some calling it a non-issue, some saying it was women against women and some others being quite feminist in voicing that dowry’s new avtar is men seeking out women with avenues to earnings. The women on the other hand suggested that solutions and points of interest discussed around the issue were hackneyed, one woman voting out the director’s viewpoint that compulsory women’s education and economic independence would innervate channels to walkout of the ensuing social cardiac arrest for the girl/ woman. Her argument was such: economic freedom was on its way in many sectors, yet we being the way we are, social encrustation click-shut in place would still not allow empowerment. Yet another, furious (as much as I was) about the fact that marriage was made such an important event in a woman’s life, that it become an overwhelming moment blurring her prior and future existence, identity and achievement…the probable demon in the closet. Strongly driven passion with which these women spoke out was a disturbing thing for civic minded in the crowd, causing instant murmurs of madness. It seemed to the sane amongst us apparently, that feminist jingoists were biting off more attention than they deserved at the forum. If one listened closer, a lot of what was being said was not passion-fruit NGO style. The furor and the raging fire-breath tone surely could have been avoided, but there were some real genuine suggestions to what could confute this mayhem of woman-trampling rampant in all sections of modern India.

   The reason I have spent reviewing the discussion more than the film is because the success of a socio-political movie, for a country like India, lies in discussions it triggers. I for one am extremely intrigued to discuss the philosophy of the filmmaker and the content depicted, with an honest probing of perceptions amongst the audiences. Shah’s self-confessed ideology about content being larger than artistic and technical endeavor is something that sat smiling to my heart. Personally, film-making in India has turned (and I’m not even going close to mainstream endeavours which in my own words is nothing but bull *#*% but even alternate, “art-film” circles) mostly about technique and utility of sophistication. Sadly however, all attempts to turn up the jazz and keep pace with our western primate brothers are left soulless. I think film in a developing country is a medium that is very labile, and a filmmaker is very responsible for what he needs to say. Leave out the superficial narcissism to your subject and demystify filmmaking.

   Ok, so much for that, having said that, paradoxically I wish to argue against the same point made above, but let me clarify. Content is of utmost importance, but what leaves me squirming in my seat is, not an unaesthetic, but a (in the name of sticking to realism and) depicting-truth-as-it-is disempowering theme. Let me tell you what gets me going, a visual journey brimming with novel ways to look at a problem; the term I ‘d like to use is treatment. Content and honesty and social responsibility is all fine but I’m beginning to think that re-hashing in the name of realism, cultural learned helplessness prototypes for characters does nothing useful to the society. It lands up re-enforcing negative role models and cliches of how we think roles within, (ex: lets say a middle class family) needs to be mete out. This era of trying to report the real causes for what-they-are-the-way-they-are, needs to pass. What needs to emerge is a filmmakers weaving of choices that are alternative to the ones chosen by their archetypes in the past, on celluloid or elsewhere in Indian media history. So, build characters that would, in the given situation, deal with it differently or leave the baggage behind and make fresh choices. I’m not asking for a utopian panacea of a movie, but for filmmakers to make a practical leap of faith within their researched backdrop so that empowerment may happen. My argument is, awareness is building, (be it about AIDS, dowry, women’s issues, child labour etc) but the ways of responding to the problem remains folklore since we don’t have tools within our cultural teachings to handle it.

   How did Kundan Shah go about the film? Finally I get to the film, but I’ve gotten to the point much earlier, and I hope you agree. Cloyingly poignant but well-crafted narrative is centered on Lata, Machhli (the middle born) and Choti (the little one) three of whom are annoyingly siamese. (Something I credited to craft later and relished based on Shah’s statement that girls with this sort of psychosocial trauma are often autistic and tend to stick to one another relinquishing all individuality). Lata is painfully self-deprecating with all the symptoms of the responsible older one-sobriety and blind sense of being her parents’ bonded labourer. The middle one is supposedly the prettier one (I personally found Lata to be the more attractive one) who many a groom-came-seeking-Lata’s hand-in-marriage drooled over instead. Choti is the rebel-with-reason, impulsive, and of course with the ‘truth-tongue’. What’s intriguing in the plot is the delving into the interchangeable psyche of these three young women, the control they share over one another and the inevitable looming-doom they hold on to but deny self-responsibility in the act. Lata with an MA in literature is so brainwashed that she solely regards her existence to rely on the institution of marriage as a felicity that will bring legitimacy to her life. She seeks a non-existent relationship with the man who came and left. None of the other sisters really try to take her, even for argument’s sake beyond these marriage dreams of hers; on the contrary singing soon-to-be wedding songs to incite her already jarred psyche. Choti, a firebrand with practicality is unable to seek a way out of the romantic deaths the older two have spelt out for themselves (and unconsciously woven the little one’s fate into the web). Her existence, her age, and her character, replete with incomplete social skills and sole dependence on the siblings render her powerless. The three hang off the ceiling, a scene shown suggestively and powerfully. However, Shah doesn’t end with this agony post the knuckle cracking build-up. A surreal appearance of the three on a television show titled the achievers as the post-climax talks strongly of the director’s hope for the future and what he perhaps wishes will shape the end to this blackguard history of our nation, repression and commodification of women.

   As a last few comments, I think I now seem to understand KS’s way of crafting this relief moment for the target audience who will perhaps see it as I wish them to. It should function as “stop-and-turn-it-around-moment” from what it fatalistically moved toward, and in doing so, allow fresh ways of response that may shift the power to our inside.

4. tushar on December 4th, 2006 9:43 am

   thanks for the amazing review, Deepak.
   I didnt catch the film, but you more or less made up for it :-)

5. Deepak Srinivasan on December 4th, 2006 11:30 pm

   A friend of mine wrote back to me thru e-mail with comments to the review….
   Hi Deepak
   Loved the review of the event and not just the film.
   Would like to sit and discuss it with you. The concepts you have touched
   upon are very thought provoking and need a good debate and discussion to do
   justice to it. I am eternally infuenced by Heisenberg’s uncertainity
   principle, in which he philosophically concluded that just by observing or
   measuring an object or entity we are influencing its behaviour. IN OTHER
   WORDS I wonder how much I will be able to be objective about a another
   gendr’s issue or even for that matter another person regardles of gender.
   These are all intersting questions you have raised and fairly important ones
   ————————————-
   to which I had to reply with the following, thought I’d post it here…maybe interesting for some
   ———————————————-

   Definitely, it is true that the observer influences
   objects he observes…science stated it in the form of Heisenberg but
   mainstream reductionist biology and other sciences choose to deny it!
   lol
   which is an entirely different and intiguing talk you and I should have soon…
   somehow, my request with that review though, is that it shouldnt be
   percieved as an attack on the democracy of filmmakers…filmmaking is
   definitely about perspective and a filmmaker has all the right to show
   it whichever way he wants it to….
   but at the same time, discussions and reviews and counter-reviews all
   stand together in the same space…i dont agree that
   counter-arguments are presented to vanquish the older ones, they
   revise them, or maybe on comparing, the older one would be better than
   the new…who is to say that new is better?
   Also, I wish to add that a film that is worth seeing and talking about will generate criticism and not passive acceptance…so thats a good sign

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