Torsa Ghoshal

1. Mrinal Sen’s trilogy is contextualized within the filmmaker’s

leftist politics.
2. In discussing the cinematic idiom of the Calcutta trilogy, Sen’s use
of formal strategies, identified as integral to international cinematic
movements like the French New Wave, emerges as a point of
departure.
3. Sen’s adaptation, rejection, and modification of such strategies
remain intertwined with their attempts to historically trace the
world in which they and their characters lived.
Post-independence Calcutta found its cultural expression in Mrinal Sen’s
Calcutta Trilogy: Interview (1970), Calcutta’71 (1972), and Padatik or
The Guerilla Fighter (1973).
The period between the formation of the Film Society and the making of
the Calcutta trilogy was marked by struggles to find adequate means and
modes for articulating the problems of a society in transition on
celluloid. Sen was making films to develop and explore their cinematic
idioms. Calcutta, as a city, was struggling to accommodate an ever-
increasing population, the interests of the different classes of this
population, and accompanying urban industrial problems. Simmering
tensions came to a head with the mobilization of rural and urban
populations of Bengal in the armed uprising of the Naxalites from 1967
to 1975.
Sen located and directed his Calcutta trilogies in the period when
Calcutta had become the epicenter of the Naxalite revolt. As inhabitants
in the city faced continual threats of death, violence, and destruction, the
contradictions and anxieties that had been latent in Calcutta ever since
independence were exposed during the Naxal period. Thus, the trilogy
engages with a fragmented and formless society exploding with the
violent energy of the masses. The nascent societal scenario also posited
challenges to Sen’s crafts.
The examination of the cinematic techniques used in the Calcutta
trilogies reveals how Mrinal Sen sought to find a form amidst the
formless violence of the city. International cultural transactions that had
been central to the development of cinematic aesthetics in Calcutta
offered an eclectic repertoire of narrative tools to articulate the processes
and consequences of the breaking down of societal infrastructure. Thus,
Sen’s search for the appropriate narrative mode for these films can be
understood about the broader issues concerning the representation of an
“every day” that is spatially and temporally trapped within a violent
interregnum.
Sen’s trilogy gets written about in the context of his leftist politics.
to represent the exceptional everydays of 1960s-70s Calcutta.
Sen’s trilogy reflect on the nature of everyday life in the light of the
socio-political turmoil that remains at the forefront through the
Naxalite period and the biopolitical foundations that provoke such
turmoil.
i) the use of representational techniques engendered in foreign
historical and geopolitical conditions, carrying definite
ideological connotations to different cultural ends in the
trilogies.
ii) Sen’s engagement with narrative techniques adopted (and
indeed adapted) from the French New Wave. the stylistic
devices of “interruption” employed in the French New Wave
films that include freeze frames, jump cuts, and other
 techniques to interfere with the audience’s immersive
experience.
iii) Sen’s approach toward “interruption” as a narrative mode
with their divergent takes on the unfolding history through
the Naxalite era. It underscores the aforementioned
oxymoron, exceptional everyday, remains the formal and
the thematic core of the Calcutta trilogy.
iv) The themes are borne out by the struggles of the characters
who populate the story worlds, and a closer look at their
shared quests for the “good life,” reinforces the shared
history underpinning the films.

French New Wave and its Aesthetic Regime

The first film from Mrinal Sen’s trilogy, Interview, was released in
1970. It opens with the story of an ordinary young man, Ranjit Mullick,
and follows him through one day as he prepares himself for an interview
for a job at a foreign firm in Calcutta. The name of the actor Mrinal Sen
cast for the role is also Ranjit Mullick. Sen incorporates a sequence
where a girl aboard the same public bus in which Ranjit is travelling to
his office notices his photograph in a film magazine. Starstruck, the girl
keeps looking at Ranjit, which makes him uncomfortable, and he bursts
into a monologue looking at the camera:
The photo that you are looking at, in the magazine, is mine….Look, I am
not an actor. I am not a star, not at all. My name is Ranjit Mullick. I
work in a weekly newspaper’s office….Mine is quite an uneventful life.
And Mrinal Sen, the person who makes movies, liked it and said that he
will follow me with camera from morning to dusk
The sequence destabilizes the role of the camera that mediates objects,
people and events. With the transgression of diegetic levels that interrupt
the contract between the spectator and the film-text, freeze frames, and
intertextual references to other films, the disjointed narrative of
Interview unapologetically draws upon the right bank French New
Wave.
techniques and idioms like self-reflexivity, like Ranjit talking to the
camera in Sen’s film, also draw attention to the filming and production
values of the particular films (in this case, Interview), reinforcing the
film’s embeddedness in the crises and contradictions of its culture.
The opening title cards of Sen’s film, Padatik or The Guerilla Fighter,
enumerate the multitude of problems in 70s Calcutta including strikes,
inflation, and riots. The titular captions are transposed on the footage of
newspapers emerging out of printing machines, thereby visually
referencing newspaper headlines. “Kerosene Disappears from Market,”
“Thousands of Ghost Ration Cards Seized by Police,” “Death out of
Starvation Reported,” “Factionalism Inside Political Parties,” “Exams
Disrupted,” “Government Pledged to Restore Law and Order” report
each of the title cards. The background score captures the loud noise of
mobs on the streets of the city. Presenting information without formally
weaving them into a seamless narrative, Padatik’s exposition establishes
the socio-political scenario as a key player in the film that follows the
life of a Naxal activist, Sumit, after he takes refuge in the apartment of a
Naxal sympathizer, Mrs. Mitra. That Sumit is in hiding, grounds the film
in the fifth phase of the Naxalite movement, characterized by the state’s
crackdown on the Naxalite activists.
The essence of film lies in continuity, or “flow of life,” argues
Siegfried Kracauer. Employing different aesthetic tools from the
French New Wave, Sen interrupts that flow, breaking the illusion of
continuity. Sen’s take on the efficacy of interruptions is not so much
about their faith or distrust of certain cinematic techniques as it is
about their distinct understanding of the milieu they portray.
Sen’s divergent aesthetics ask whether persistent violence through an era
ought to be understood as a continuation of a decadent society or as a
radical break that anticipates a new one. Further, is violence itself an
extension of the everyday life or an interruption to everyday and the
ordinary in the sense of being an exception?
Naxal Movement: State of Exception or State of Continuity?
through interruptions like strikes and blasts the internal temporality of
the revolution and its logic is repeated and this interrupted life
establishes its own everyday rhythm.
The montage that follows the expository voiceover in Sen’s Calcutta’71
juxtaposes trams and buses, mobs of street dwellers and poverty-stricken
population walking across the city, racing horses, the movement of the
type writer, printing press, fingers strumming stringed musical
instruments, firing of guns and so on. Sequences intercutting one another
establish a unique rhythm of repeated interruptions in Calcutta’71.
Ranjit’s Bengali traditional costume, which he has to wear because his
suit is in the laundry, is interpreted as a sign of resistance against the
bourgeoisie sustained by the investments of foreign firms.
Thus, owing to the active involvement of some students like Sumit,
Biman (Padatik) and the anonymous young man of Calcutta’71 in the
Naxalite movement, a paranoid establishment arbitrarily identifies other
young men as enemies even as they (Ranjit and Siddhartha) aspire to
integrate themselves with the system.
Sen’s Interview, with its interlocutions and stylistics, reinforces the idea
that this is exceptional and specific to the Calcutta of the 1970s, and
accordingly voices the hope that this system ought to change.
Calcutta’71 most notably traces the process of a society’s submergence
into poverty and squalor over decades. The film’s five parts are dated
1933, 1943, 1953 and the opening and the ending sequences are dated
1971. However, despite the seeming trajectory of continuation, the
dating of the episodes and their segmentation into parts fractures the
sense of seamless continuity. They project these dates and decades as
exceptions. It is only in Padatik, the final installment of Sen’s trilogy,
that the continuity of oppression and struggles is narrativized. In
Padatik, Mrs. Mitra who shelters Sumit, the Naxalite on the run,
mentions that her brother had died while fighting for the revolutionaries
in Punjab. Sumit’s father had been active in the freedom struggles and
the film ends with Sumit’s father’s support for his son’s cause.
Compared with Sen’s two earlier films, Interview and Calcutta’71,
Padatik even generally registers fewer moments of self-reflexive
interruptions.
The cinematic language of interruption, of course, has a
transhistorical and transnational association with class antagonism.
Coherent narration in twentieth-century films and literature has
been consistently equated with the preservation of the status quo.
Sen’s formal strategies overtly emphasizes interruptions.
Fighting for the Good Life
the search for the good life—a project of overcoming the bare life and
individuating the self or the group—that directs all the protagonists
through Sen’s trilogy. The quests, in turn, lead them to reconsider their
ethical and political positions.
Sen’s Ranjit, the protagonist of Interview, dreams of joining a “better”
firm and thereby suggests possibilities of filling Shyamalendu’s shoes in
the fight for the “good life.” However, the rest of the protagonists
through Sen’s trilogy struggle for “humanity,” broadly conceived. In
Calcutta’71 the protagonist is dead by the time the narrative begins but
hopes that his death can trigger the changes that his life could not. He
asks the audience:
Are you listening? … Do you know why I’ve come here? I’m here to tell
you that I know who killed me. But, I won’t tell their names. I want you
to find them. Why are you without worry? Why are you so idle? Why are
you so numb and dull? Aren’t you citizens of this country?
In both Interview and Calcutta’71, such scenes of interrogation—a
French New Wave-like narrative strategy—that interrupt the diegetic
plane also manifest faith in transforming the “conditio inhumana” or
inhuman condition. In addition, Sen’s narrative, with its flow interrupted
by the interrogation, self-reflexively invites the audience to join the
quest for good life.
Conclusion
Torsa Ghoshal’s study of sen’s Calcutta trilogy enables us to grasp
the contesting and the complementary modes each used to interpret
and represent the everyday struggles characteristic of 1970s
Calcutta, with its interruptions, repetitions, and repeated
interruptions. Sen’s corpus and his cinematic idiom in the Calcutta
Trilogy is discussed, especially in the context of world cinema, their
engagement with formal strategies identified as having been
developed through international cinematic movements like the
French New Wave emerge as a point of departure. Sen’s adaptation,
rejection, and modification of such formal strategies make way for
their meditation on immediate local issues. Sen’s monumental
significance within the international, Indian, and Bengali cinemas,
remains intertwined with his attempts to historically trace the world
in which they and his characters lived.
A Cinema on Red Alert: Mrinal Sen's Interview and In Search of
Famine
Mrinal Sen applied Brecht’s theories to film and started not only
Brechtian cinema but the radical left-wing political cinema in India,
posing the first serious challenge to the realist, liberal humanist
aesthetic inaugurated by Satyajit Ray in 1955 with Pather
Panchali/Song of the Little Road.
In France, Jean Luc Godard successfully integrated Brechtian
alienation devices into his highly polemical cinema. Mrinal Sen
followed suit with his major films like Interview, bristling with a
forbidding Brechtian arsenal: non-linear, episodic narratives; an
aggressive montage designed to rupture the text; intrusive
voiceovers; written texts and slogans; a mix of documentary and
fictive modes; sound as a counterpoint to the content of the film, and
so on.
Suranjan Ganguly poses that mere Brecht was not an adequate
safeguard in preventing a film with a progressive political agenda
from being bourgeois at heart. A cinema on red alert was needed,
which displayed an acute self-consciousness about its nature and
function. Many of Mrinal Sen’s display such a consciousness, which
make them unique in the history of Indian cinema. Suranjan
Ganguly focused on his most reflexive works - – Interview in which
he sets out to question his role, that of his actors, the film itself, and
finally, the viewer who is directly involved in the film’s self-
interrogation.
Confessing to the Camera
Sen interrogates his functions as a filmmaker in Interview during the
Brechtian tram moment. The moment shattered the accustomed
transparent screen illusionism of the predominantly bourgeois audience
in India.
Mrinal Sen caters to middle-class expectations from the start of the film
by providing a relatable (identifiable) protagonist. In his early twenties,
Ranjit has the good looks of a matinee idol and plenty of infectious,
high-spirited energy. The search for a suit on which his job hinges seems
straight out of a neorealist scenario – sympathies are openly solicited.
But before this ‘‘bourgeois’’ film can get off the ground, it self-destructs
spectacularly. Travelling in a crowded bus, Ranjit comes across his own
photograph in a popular film magazine which a young woman is
reading. She tries to match face with image, becomes confused and
Ranjit explains, looking directly at the camera, that it is indeed his
photograph – he is Ranjit Mullick, the actor of the same name in a film
by Mrinal Sen. He then complains of being trapped in Sen’s film, of
being hounded by him even as he goes about his daily life, and that even
his search for a job is being exploited for the camera. This is followed by
a shot of Sen’s cameraman K.K. Mahajan filming the scene. Then we
hear a loud ‘‘cut’’ on the soundtrack, the filming stops and the crew
leaves. Ranjit continues talking to us. Although it’s Ranjit who
deconstructs Sen and himself, the camera’s presence never let us forget
that it’s the filmmaker’s orchestration in his own deconstruction. Sen’s
bark – “cut” – establishes his indisputed authority. In other words,
Ranjit’s confession is controlled and administered by Sen, the arch-
contriver who puts words into his mouth. Even as Ranjit complains
about exploitation, Sen attests through his presence that he is indeed
exploiting his actor. And since Ranjit will not be allowed another
outburst until towards the end of the film, we have no doubt that Sen
keeps a tight reign on his creation. Thus, paradoxically, as he
deconstructs his role as filmmaker-exploiter, Sen also upholds it. Sen’s
auto-critique, is shown to be merely a device, staged like the rest of the
film. In other words, the filmmaker deconstructs the auto-critique that
deconstructs him. The narrative doesn’t resume after the “confession”
gets over and he gets off the bus, a stand-in for the viewer, a chronic
commentator, looks at the camera and asks, ‘‘Do you call this cinema?
This is about you, about me.’’ His question, of course, is deeply ironic.
The director assures, through his interlocutor that his film is “real”. It
deals with everyday existence but its celluloid realism cannot be
ignored. The difference between this cinema and its fake bourgeois
counterpart is that this one admits to its fakeness. Sen had made such a
distinction even as Ranjit was confessing to us. There was an implied
criticism of the bourgeois filmmaker who maintains tight control over
his/her subject and manipulates the audience without ever coming clean.
Sen, who too has an ideology (Marxist) to preach, at least admits to his
role.
The Actors as Double Texts
Mrinal Sen urges his actors to admit that they are actors, for instance, the
key characters often retain their real-life names in a film, maintain a a
fluid movement between their on-screen and off-screen personae, meet
the gaze of the viewer, talk directly to him/her and successfully thwart
attempts at identification. Performance is foregrounded through
deliberate overacting, exaggeration, inane repetition of dialogue and
displays of nervous energy or hyper-activity at the most mundane of
moments (Interview is full of such examples). During the confession
sequence inside the bus, Ranjit tells the viewers that he’s “real” but not
his mother - ‘‘she’s an actress’’. Sen insists that she is an actress by
jumpcutting to the scene in Ray’s Pather Panchali in which she, playing
Sarbojaya, breaks down when her husband, not knowing their daughter
is dead, shows her the sari he has brought for the girl. The intrusion from
frame within a frame sheds the disbelief that she’s not real. Karuna
Banerjee catapulted to the Bengali memory with her role as Apu’s
mother in Pather Panchali, thus, Sen exploits her iconic stature by
making her play the mother in Interview. Here too she has two children
(although they’re grownup). There is even a scene where she chides her
elder daughter just like she chided Durga, showing a clear preference for
her male child. Finally, her performance in the film has a life-like
quality which in Pather Panchali had earned her the reputation of not
acting at all. Thus, creating a complex relationship between the viewer
and the actress.
The Actor’s Interrogation
Towards the end of the film, Mrinal has the viewer interrogate Ranjit
about his failed interview. Earlier in the film, Ranjit provoked his viewer
inside the bus, now it is the viewer who gets a chance to retaliate. By
placing the viewer inside the film, Sen dismantles the last remaining
pretence at realism. It is followed by an attempt at an interactive
dialogue, by the voice of the viewer, resembling that of Sen. Dogged by
the viewer who endlessly provokes him by asking about the interview,
Ranjit begins another confession, admitting his dreams of great
bourgeois success and catering to a neocolonial culture that judges
people by the clothes they wear. Ranjit speaks directly to the camera,
displaying a newly found formed political consciousness as he blames
his debacle on an unjust, exploitative society, then proceeds to smash a
showroom window and strip a mannequin dressed in Western clothes. In
other words, thanks to the mediation of the viewer, Ranjit turns activist.
If he had sought to educate the viewer about cinema and the nature of
representation, then the viewer now returns the favour by providing him
with a political education. By handing over the film to the viewer, the
director gives the viewers the freedom to determine how Ranjit should
act and how the film should end. Ranjit is manipulated by his maker and
by his viewer as the film closes. This sense of manipulation reminds that
t it’s not simply Ranjit who is under interrogation, but the actor Ranjit
Mullick as well. Ranjit’s performance is being probed, he is being asked
to explain what it’s like to be ‘‘Ranjit’’. We know just as well as the
actor does that he’s acting for the camera, that his gaze at the camera is
not simply to acknowledge the viewer but to acknowledge the camera
itself. ‘‘Ranjit’’ is thus dismantled during his interrogation into Ranjit
Mullick the actor. The experiments of Mrinal Sen are not strictly related
to film but they deepen our awareness of the nature and potential of
cinema. The politics of form in Mrinal Sen emerges from the
consciousness of what film is and what it can do. He disrupts
expectations, distancing and making the viewer, reflect. He makes the
viewer reconstitute the position in relation to the screen. The political
involvement with film begins with the disruptions in the imaginary
space of the theater and continue long after the shift into the “real”
world.
Blurring the Lines
Sen’s fascination with performance leads him to create juxtapositions
where the real is placed in relation to the illusory and vice versa. Since
his investigations take place on film and through film, the real is always
the ‘‘real’’, its illusionism made transparent through the debate
surrounding it. Frequently, not only does the real prove to be illusory,
but the illusory often proves more ‘‘real’’ than the real.
In Interview, the exaggerated acting makes us aware that we’re watching
a performance. Sen goes even further by drawing attention to the
carefully orchestrated deception that underlies all such performances
when he has Ranjit pretend that he’s sulking because his girlfriend
Bulbul has been on the phone too long. She is taken in just as we are
whereupon Ranjit bursts out laughing: ‘‘Didn’t I act well?’’ Bulbul
compares him to the reigning Bengali matinee idol, Uttam Kumar –
another one of Sen’s iconic references.
Film Begets Film
The dense intertextuality within Sen’s films emerges from the repeated
references, which gives a sense of film begetting a film, that films
constantly borrow from, refer to and engage in critiques of each other,
that they have less to do with life and almost everything to do with film
as film. In short, a film is essentially about itself. Self-referentiality is
evident in Calcutta 71, when he inserts Interview into it. The film
literally opens with the last shots from Interview – Ranjit smashing the
showroom window. Then the film shifts to its present – to a Kafkaesque
mock trial where Ranjit is in the dock and the mannequin with a noose
around its neck is displayed as the ‘‘victim’’ of Ranjit’s vandalism.
Thus, Calcutta 71 picks up where Interview left off and develops some
of its major concerns without alluding to the film again. There is, then, a
sense of continuity, an evolving pattern that binds Sen’s films together
into a complex metacinema. His films live within each other, resurface
in new guises and often self-consciously allude to their various
resurrections.
Sen’s cross-referencing of films made by other filmmakers suggests a
desire to connect with film history, trace cinematic lineages and make
distinctions between certain kinds of cinema. When Ranjit, at the
hairdresser’s, glances at a magazine article on D.G. Phalke – the man
who pioneered cinema in India – Sen expects us to place Interview
within the continuity of Indian film history as well as outside it since the
film seeks to challenge its own cinematic inheritance.
The cross-referencing, thus, sparks off debates and discourses which are
not only pertinent to Sen’s philosophy of film but to his political agenda
as well. In Interview Sen targets the false, bourgeois cinema as he
jumpcuts from the bus passenger’s riposte – ‘‘Do you call this cinema?’’
– to a march by strikers who belong to the Cinema Union. Film theatres
playing mainstream films are closed and garish posters covered with
workers’ handbills and graffiti. Sen’s wish-fulfilment fantasy calls for a
complete boycott of such a cinema, the dismantling of its exhibition and
distribution system. In the montage that follows, he edits in shots of
peasants, workers, and demonstrators – all of whom participate in the
struggle for a better world. In such a world there is no place for the
bourgeoisie and its fake cinema.
Chasing the Sign
infiltration by signs is also a major issue in Interview since Ranjit’s
search for a better job and a better life takes place in a consumerist
world of posters, billboards and graffiti. As he walks through this
dreamscape of desire, Ranjit registers each sign consciously as well as
subconsciously. This is brought out vividly when he decides to borrow a
suit from a friend and Sen cuts to a montage of billboard signs
advertizing men’s clothing. Enamoured by the sign which defines
bourgeois prosperity for him, Ranjit pays no attention to the socio-
economic and political factors that underlie his infatuation. When the
interview committee turns him down because he didn’t wear a suit to the
interview, Ranjit rejects his bourgeois dream with a symbolic act of
protest. He hurls all his anger at the biggest sign of all – the Western-
clothed mannequin in the showroom window. Once the symbol of his
aspirations, now it embodies his deepest frustrations. Ranjit has learnt to
deconstruct the sign.
Sen also foregrounds signs in Interview to make us conscious of one of
the most complex sign systems of all – the cinema itself. He is especially
concerned with bourgeois cinema, its ability to not only manipulate our
deepest feelings and desires, but to define our sense of self and reality.
Our daily negotiations with the real, he suggests, are conditioned by
what the cinema calls real. In other words, our experience of the world is
mediated by our experience of the movies.
Finally, Sen doesn’t want us to forget that Ranjit Mullick, the actor as
well as his on-screen persona (the man who reads all the signs wrong) in
Interview, are both signs within the film’s sign system. With that
awareness, our deconstruction of ‘‘Ranjit’’ is complete.
Invoking the Other Arts
Sen’s reflexivity has clearly evolved in directions he probably could
not have foreseen when he orchestrated Ranjit’s attack in the bus.
What is especially remarkable about his experiments is the way they
extend to issues which are not strictly related to film but deepen our
awareness of the nature and potential of cinema. If there is a politics
of form in Sen’s work, then it emerges from our consciousness of
what film is and what it can do. By disrupting our expectations,
distancing us and making us reflect on what we bring to the movie
theatre, he makes us reconstitute our position in relation to the
screen. Our political involvement with film begins with these
disruptions in the imaginary space of the theatre and continue long
after we shift into the ‘‘real’’ world.