FLASHBACK TO THE 50s (PART VII)
KAAGAZ KE PHOOL (1959)

Right off the start with an opening shot of a decrepit old film director entering the gates of his erstwhile studio while a giant statue towers over him, the pace is set for the strangely surreal shots and unconventional camerawork that inhabit the rest of Kaagaz Ke Phool. In many ways this opening scene is reminiscent of Citizen Kane, the 1948 Orson Wells classic that employed the concept of gigantism (if anyone remembers the camera panning the huge gateway to a gargantuan gloomy palace of the fallen from grace media moghul) to underline the insignificance of the personal and the mortal.



This liberal borrowing from a Hollywood classic was not at all unusual for the time. Hindi cinema had always looked to Hollywood for inspiration and technique. Also the fifties were a decade when Indian cinema was struggling to carve its own niche. A niche that, as the subsequent decades would show, stuck to storytelling in the old melodrama-musical format while borrowing heavily from Hollywood and Italian neorealism.

After decades of telling tales of gods and goddesses, kings and noblemen, the 50s saw Bollywood celluloid showcasing the struggles of the ordinary man; the Awaara, the 420, the Pyaasa, the Do bigha-owning peasant and the all sacrificing Mother (India). And in telling these new stories more effectively, cinema had to adopt to new modes of expressions and techniques; scenes had to be composed with more care and plots had to be restructured around the dance and music. Overall these led to major changes in filmaking styles from 30s and 40s. Guru Dutt, one of the leading filmmakers of the time, played a major role in this metamorphosis.

In an earlier film Pyaasa, the audience got the first glimpse of Dutt's experimentation with the plot and technique. In this unconventional story of a misunderstood poet, Dutt showed the poet's relation to fame, his romance with a nautch girl and his ultimate rejection of society as he walked away with the girl. For Hindi cinema, hitherto, given to Devdas-esque rejection of a prostitute, this treatment was refreshingly new. As was the depiction of the romance. For something that was quite centerstage to the story, the romance was underplayed. And yet it was very touching and endearing. Dutt had folk singers sing of Radha's yearning for Krishna, while Waheeda playing the prostitute Gulabo, looked on with a smile laced in melancholy.

In Kaagaz Ke Phool, the story of the fall of a film director, it wasn't the plot or characterization or the format alone that set it apart; Guru Dutt also made major technical improvisations. These would be easily obvious even to a less discerning eye especially in the picturization of the songs.

Technically there was a lot going for Kaagaz.... For starters, it was the first film in India to be shot in cinemascope. Then, there was V. K Murthy in whose hands the camera and stock came to life (1). And nowhere was this more evident than the Waqt Ne Kiya picturization. Here, with Murthy at the camera, and S.D Burman's music blending with Kaifi Azmi's lyrics while Geeta Dutt poured molten gold over the soundtrack, was born the rarest and most beautifully shot song sequence of Hindi cinema. It was another matter that an equally complex tale was being played out in real life too, as husband Guru Dutt was using Geeta Dutt's mellifluous voice to woo the beautiful Waheeda with the song.



This has often been called the beam effect scene; the shaft of light that served to light Waheeda's face also served to signify the passage of time, dim and disappear as it did with the protagonist's exit from the scene.

For a film that had so much going for it, Kaagaz...'s characters were not very well sketched out. And that was perhaps the film's greatest drawback. Dutt is said to have realized this later and accepted that while it was brilliant in parts there were reels where the screenplay dragged or was irrevelant.

In the story with had autobiographical shades, the protagonist film director Suresh Sinha (Guru Dutt) is estranged from his wife and child. Sinha meets a young lady Shanti (played by Waheeda Rehman) on a rainy night and parts with his coat since she is wet and cold and poor as well (sardi zukaam muft mein milte hai par garam coat ke liye paisa lagta hai). Shanti comes to his studio to return the coat, and inadvertently walks into a scene being shot; the director upon seeing the rushes is convinced of her histrionic abilites and persuades her to enter filmdom. Gradually a romance develops between the middle aged director and young Shanti. When this features in gossip magazines, the director's daughter implores Shanti to leave her father. Which she does. But in the legal battle for his daughter's custody director Sinha loses to his wife. From then on Suresh Sinha's life takes a downward spiral, his films flop and he takes to drink. Shanti pleads with him to make a comeback with her (she is still a popular star) in a new film but his pride comes in the way. At the end of his life he becomes a loner, an impoverished man, working as an extra and living a vagabond existence.

And yet in his fall and in the ignominy of his defeat, there is a grace and a ethereal quality, that never quite allows the viewer to wallow in his sorrow or proclaim him a failure.

1 Talking about V. K Murthy's camerawork, one can never forget the playful light and dark oscillations between the dancers and their shadows intersecting with the pillars casting their long shadows, in Sahib Biwi Ghulam's "Saaqiya aaj mujhe neend nehi aayegi", another classic song picturization of Bollywood.