[Reader-list] Tracing Phalke

[Jeebesh]

  dear all, here is a beautiful account of Dada Saheb Phalke. Phalke  
pioneered filmmaking in India. warmly Jeebesh


Arbour: Research Initiatives in Architecture

The PORTRAITS Series

invites you to

Tracing Phalke

Kamal Swaroop will project his scrap book, tell stories and explore  
the Phalke Wikipedia

on Tuesday 19 July at 7:00 pm at Arbour AV Space

Do join us for tea at 6:30 pm

[Poster attached. Detailed venue address below.]

The PORTRAITS series - will develop a biographical take on a thinker,  
artists, patron, historical figure, who's contribution in one way or  
another to our space of culture and thinking has been crucially  
important. The series will invite practitioners, thinkers and scholars  
to do this portrait presentation as against only historians, to  
specifically engage with the relationship a practitioner shares with  
other figures in the design, architetcure, art and cultural field. The  
series aims at developing ideas in the process of History and Practice.

Notes on the Phalke project...

My journey and Phalke

I was born in Kashmir in 1952. My father was an educationist. I was  
brought up in Ajmer, Pushker. I finished my graduation in science  
biology in1969 and did my post graduation in film direction in 1974  
from F.T.I.I Poona. Same year my film Dorothy was given best  
documentary film award by Filmfare. My first job was with Children  
film society of India, teaching village children how to make films. In  
1975 I joined I.S.R.O as a senior producer making science educational  
programmes for the village children; it was India’s first experiment  
in satellite transmission. This was the time when new wave was  
happening. We had formed a film cooperative and produced films like  
Ghashi ram Kotwall and Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb daastaan. Somewhere the  
idea of film cooperatives failed. And all of us parted our ways.

After this I did various things-teaching puppetry, drawing, story  
telling and traveling all over the country. Around beginning of  
eighties I started working as assistant director in foreign film  
productions. My big opportunity came with Gandhi where I worked as  
chief assistant director, at the same time continuing as a writer in  
art films. In 1988 I produced Om Darbdar which won the Filmfare  
critic’s award for the best film. This was a Dadaist kind of a film.  
This film was about adolescence and myths of Pushker- the only place  
where Brahma the creator and the father is allowed to be worshiped. He  
is also the god of the artist and the craftsmen.

I was wondering what to do next and met a psychoanalyst friend who  
suggested why not make a film about learning and imagination itself. I  
hit upon the idea of Phalke, his life compresses all process of  
learning that goes in film art. He himself is a product of the  
industrial art school. Since then all my work has been Phalke related— 
teaching, workshops, documentaries, short films, promos, subsidizing  
my dream to make a big mainstream film on his life and times,  
encompassing time span between 1870-1944.As Brahma of the Pushker is  
the father of the artisan, so is Phalke of trimbak given the title of  
father of Indian cinema-my two obsessions.


Tracing Phalke – A Biographical introduction

As we follow the life of Phalke we see a definite pattern of learning  
and essential experience that materialized/manifested itself in his  
filmmaking. After being trained in the scriptures and story-telling by  
his father, a Sanskrit scholar and astronomer, he moved to Sir  
J.J.School of arts where he learnt tracing, drawing and moulding. It  
was the time when the mechanical means of reproduction were being  
introduced. Industrial arts were beginning. The traditional arts and  
crafts people were finding themselves jobless. A new breed of artist  
and crafts people were being nurtured in art school to cope with the  
new market demands. The idea of perspective, oil painting and  
representing the nature in its free form were being introduced.

After passing from J.J.School, Phalke went to the Kala Bhavan in  
Baroda where he  learnt photography, printing and magic. He began his  
career as a small town photographer in Godhra but had to leave  
business after the death of his first wife and child in an out break  
of the bubonic plague. Persecuted, driven by from the city where he  
practiced the new art of photography (camera seen as life snatching  
lens), he went through a paranoia state for some time. During which he  
met the German magician Carl Hertz, one of the 40 magicians employed  
by the Lumiere Brothers. Soon after, he had the opportunity to work  
with the Archeological Survey of India as a draftsman. However,  
restless with his job and its constraints, and moved by the swadeshi  
and swaraj spirit, he turned to the business of printing. He  
specialized in lithography and oleography, and worked for Raja Ravi  
Varma, man producing the paintings that found homes across the  
country. He later started his own printing press, made his first trip  
abroad to Germany, to assimilate the latest technology and machinery  
and proved to be most successful at home as well as abroad, where his  
excellence received high praise But, following a dispute with his  
partners about the running of the press, he gave up printing and  
turned his attention to the moving picture.

Once again, he proved successful in his new art, and proceeded to make  
several silent films, short, documentary feature, educational, comic,  
tapping all the potential of this (dynamic explosive) new medium.  
However, the market that had opened up in the face of naked skepticism  
and against all odds, having proved its almost unlimited financial  
viability, soon attracted businessmen and money minded entrepreneurs  
who sacrificed the aesthetic and moral concerns of the new media on  
the altar of commence. Phalke thought expedient to form a film  
company, Hindustan films in partnership with five businessmen from  
Bombay in the hope that by having the financial aspect of his  
profession handled by experts in the field, he would be free to pursue  
the idealistic nature of his calling. He set up a model studio and  
trained technicians, actors, but, very soon, as with his printing  
business he ran into insurmountable problems with his partners.  
Disgusted, disillusioned and despairing, Phalke resigned from  
Hindustan company, made his first announcement of retirement from  
cinema and retreated with his family to Kashi where he wrote  
Rangbhoomi, a play. (‘Rangbhommi’ fetched him accolades and honors in  
the realm of theatre.) But lacking his imaginative genius, the  
Hindustan company ran into deep financial loss, and he was finally  
persuaded to return. But it did not suit his temperament that he had  
to surrender his unique individual identity to the demands of meeting  
schedules and release dates and, after directing a few films for the  
company, he withdrew, content to train fresh directors, and to  
supervise the technical side of films production.

But then the times changed and Phalke fell victim to the very cause he  
had championed with such zeal and self sacrifice - the onward march of  
technology. Sound had arrived. Unable to cope with the talkie times,  
the man who had fathered the Indian film industry was engulfed by an  
image explosion that rendered him inert and paralyzed. His own  
creation haunted him, mute, he fled into fragmented memories of his  
pre-cinema, magic lantern days, his children unaware of the tragedy of  
his life and excited and enthralled by a promise for the future,  
fantasizing with the adventures of the new silver screen god.