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carla |
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Guru Dutt came up in a recent conversation I had, and I thought it might be interesting to talk about him here. He made so many beloved films - *Pyaasa*, *Kaagaz ke phool*, *Chaudvin ka chand*, *Sahib bibi aur ghulam* - that were meaty, thought-provoking, sad, and lovely. His *Bahu rani* is available here on Jaman.
Guru Dutt was married to the wonderful playback singer Geeta Dutt, but I've read that the marriage was unhappy, and that the real love of his life was Waheeda Rehman. Guru Dutt died in 1964, at only 39 years of age, from a combination of alcohol and sleeping pills that was probably suicide.
I have not seen as much Guru Dutt as I would like - I expect to remedy that in the next few weeks - but from what I have seen his vision and soul were astonishing. *Pyaasa* was so tender and compelling, and its climax with the swelling strains of "Yeh duniya agar" is etched in my memory among the most powerful moments I have seen in a Hindi movie.
Please share your thoughts about Guru Dutt and his wonderful movies.
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Carla, timely post. I just bought a wonderful book called "Guru Dutt, A Life in Cinema". His impact on Indian cinema is undisputed. He was a filmmaker born ahead of his time.
After his death in 1964 he became famous around the world, introducing Indian cinema to a global audience. In the 1980's a Guru Dutt retrospective was organized in Bombay by his sons. Around the same time, international film festivals held in France, Italy and America highlighted the work of Indian directors of the fifties and Guru Dutt's films stood out.
A Japanese librarian who had seen Pyassa in a 1988 festival of Indian cinema held in Tokyo wrote "Guru Dutt's films made me realize that a film is a world in intslf. If Pyassa was not in the selection, I would never have been as committed as I am now to Indian cinema"
Actor Johnny Walker, a preferred Guru Dutt artist, summed it up like this, "There are those who make films for the masses and there are those who make films for the gentry. Guru Dutt was a director whose films were liked by the gentry and the masses. That was his greatest quality."
You can see him act in Bahurani on Jaman at http://www.jaman.com/a/video/0ahaYMEQ6P-E/
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I watched *Bahurani* last week and I thought it was wonderful - and I thought Guru Dutt was wonderful in it, such a touching performance. He played his childlike, guileless character with such delicacy - he wasn't just playing it dumb; I could genuinely perceive innocence in his eyes.
I'm dying to see more Guru Dutt now. I've got *Kaagaz ke phool* and I'm going to try to sit down with it in the next few weeks.
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I called this discussion "Guru Dutt - Tragic Genius" - but when I finally got to seeing the semi-autobiographical *Kaagaz ke phool* - a film that expounds on the "tragic genius" theme, I was underwhelmed - I liked *Pyaasa* much more.
I'm disappointed that I didn't love *Kaagaz ke phool* as much as I expected to, and I allow that the shortcomings might be in me rather than in the film - I have every intention of watching it again, and perhaps seeing it from a different perspective. Until then, though, here's an exceprt from my Filmi Geek post on the movie (read the rest at http://filmigeek.net).
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*Kaagaz ke phool* ("Paper flowers") is in many ways an exceedingly beautiful film. It is poetically written, touchingly acted, and shot with gorgeous and evocative black and white cinematography that I do not even feel qualified to describe. Its tortured artist theme, however, is somewhat grating - films about how hard it is to be a filmmaker always tend toward the self-indulgent, and even an excellently-crafted film like *Kaagaz ke phool* cannot entirely escape the gravity of that sort of navel-gazing. It is frustrating to watch the tragic evolution of people who are done in by their own stubbornness; Suresh (Guru Dutt) in particular, but Shanti (Waheeda Rehman) too, have plenty of opportunities to improve the course of their lives, and their persistent refusal to take advantage of them shifts the mood away from the tragic and toward the pathetic. At one point, after Suresh - without Shanti as his muse - makes a bad film and loses his job, there is some musing about how unforgiving the film industry is, how once one has begun to fall there is no regaining one's footing. But this is not shown to be an inevitability for Suresh - rather, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in both the professional and personal domains of his life.
None of this is to say that I did not like *Kaagaz ke phool* or that I think it is a bad film - it is, for the most part, engaging and compelling, save for a few draggy portions in the second half when we are shown Suresh's descent and degradation from a few too many different angles. But Guru Dutt and Waheeda Rehman are beautiful and charismatic, and even though the actions of their characters frustrated me, I genuinely cared about them and wanted better for them. And there were moments at which my breath caught at the sheer beauty, like the picturization of the majestic and unutterably lovely "Waqt ne kiya", the film's iconic song. I feel I need to see the film again, perhaps on a day when I am better prepared to be battered by a story that starts out bleak and gets bleaker, in order to fully appreciate its art.
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why should you love the film ? it's perfectly possible that you have no shortcoming and the film is still a classic...it just doesn't resonate with you. I had the same reaction to sahib bibi aur gulam(guru dutt).
There are so many wonderful films in the world that it's a waste of time trying to understand films we don't "get" , intuitively, I just like to pay lots of attention to the films I do...get.Classic or no classic.
I've also found that the space afforded by allowing a movie to "be" and revisting it when I'm in mood for what it offers makes a "classic" more acceptable to me even if I hated it on first viewing. (happenned with Citizen Kane)...and if you still don't like it, too bad for Guru Dutt...if he was alive he might have cared....much...
Edit: Not to make light of your review of KKP, but the difference between a self improvement paperback and a proper greek tragedy usually is that the latter is full of stubborn self destructive charecters acting out their compulsions. the former usually is ...a self improvement book. One does not think badly of one and well of the other simply because the protagonist in euripides chose to murder her kids instead of sending them to prep school.
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cdrake, your third paragraph summarizes, I think, why I am planning to watch KKP again. I wouldn't waste time on it if I didn't think there was more there to revisit.
As to your last paragraph, I have also given that point some thought. There are plenty of great stories about people making bad choices that are compelling precisely because they are about people making bad choices. For some reason, though, Suresh's bad choices really grated upon me - I think it may be not just that he made them, but that he willfully rejected multiple opportunities to right them - in life chances for redemption don't come along every day, and it's terrible to watch them be squandered. Yet perhaps that was part of the point of the film...
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depends on how a person defines redemption, though. All through Guru Dutt's ovure of films, what shines through is some sort of tragic reflection, of a person older, more mature, but with the same set of compulsions ..like a wounded animal that nevertheless keeps snapping it's jaws until it dies, through all the pain that clouds it's perception.
I think the "point" of the film was less a post game, and more an attempt at paradigm shifting people to his point of view. That all that he was offerred became meaningless in face of the fact that suresh couldn't persuade shanti to see things his way. Was he a loser for it? why sure....
but that is hardly the point to kkp.
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I have recently seen Guru Dutt's "Pyaasa, Kaagez ke Phool,Sahib Biwi aur Gulam. It was a hauntingly thrilling experience, especially the lyrics and the dialogues. They were so intense and very apt to the scenes portrayed. Sahir Ludhianvi' lyrics in Pyaasa,
"Jinne naaz hai Hind , pur woh kahan hai', was mind boggling.
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