An online class about Aakrosh and Bhavni Bhavai

There’s a thing called "Zoom", on which you can see many small talking human faces if you’re thus inclined, including your own. Thanks to Basav Biradar, who invited me to participate in one of his Indian New Wave cinema classes, I used this for the first time a couple of days ago. It was a fun session that covered a range of subjects and reminded me how much I miss teaching film criticism/analysis (or really, just discussing films with a group of engaged students).

Basav and I figured it might be interesting to discuss two 1980 films — both debut features by important directors — that dealt with caste oppression in very different ways: Ketan Mehta’s Bhavni Bhavai and Govind Nihalani’s Aakrosh. This gave me a chance to rewatch the two films close to each other, making it easier to appreciate the similarities as well as the differences (and the similarities within the differences). Was struck again by Nihalani’s use of Om Puri (something I wrote about earlier in the context of Ardh Satya, Aghaat and Party), and how he employs Puri’s remarkable face as a canvas in Aakrosh. (In that sense, this director-actor relationship was almost as intense as the ones between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, or Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, or Orson Welles and Orson Welles.)

Some of the talking points during the Zoom class included:

- the use of the folk-theatre idiom in Bhavni Bhavai
 
- how “serious” actors respond to absurdist or slapstick comedy (obligatory Jaane bhi do Yaaro reference here)

- the breaking of the Fourth Wall — and the denunciation of the movie viewer as smug and apathetic — in films like Bhavni Bhavai, and the endings of Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry and Saeed Mirza’s Arvind Desai
 
- Nihalani’s use of extreme close-ups to create a sense of claustrophobia or entrapment

- the meaning and function of the famous dual ending of Bhavni Bhavai, with gentle idealism making way for savage, no-punches-pulled activism (as the angry Mohan Gokhale character tells the singing sutradhaar, “too gentle is your river / too slow is its flow / we won’t live forever/ it’s now or never”)

- how a person from an underprivileged group might turn on — or become contemptuous of — his own origins after reaching a position of relative privilege (e.g. the Amrish Puri character in Aakrosh)

- what makes the structure of Aakrosh like an investigative thriller in places? My answer: the Naseer character Bhaskar is for long stretches the only “active” figure in the film, the only one constantly pushing ahead, trying to learn and uncover new things, immersing himself in his case much as he plunges joyfully into the sea in the film’s opening sequence. (Not very unlike the Ayushmaan Khurana character in Article 15. And of course, if Aakrosh were made today, Bhaskar too would be dismissed as a “Brahmannical saviour” in many quarters)

- The use of Hindi in Benegal's and Nihalani's films, the shift away from Urdu dialogues that were associated with a grander, less "realistic" film aesthetic, and how the studied naturalism of the New Wave films was linked to their use of language

- the politics of representation in both films, and how even the “parallel filmmakers” could become formulaic or create their own star system.

And probably a few other things I have forgotten. Anyway, the discussion went well, I think, and I’m toying with the idea of starting informal online classes myself. Anyone who is interested or has suggestions about what to discuss, get in touch. Otherwise I’ll go rogue and do something like best Norwegian horror films made before World War 1 or something such…

[Related posts: Nihalani's Aghaat and Ardh Satya; Party; Bhavni Bhavai]