[Reader-list] Film Screening: Ghashiram Kotwal

[rohitrellan at aol.in]

Hi, 


Time/Date: Friday, November 24 at 4 PM - 7 PM


Venue: Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi, India 110054 



The Sarai Programme invites you to the eighth screening of the film series titled, The Wager on Cinema : Yukt Film Cooperative’s 'Ghashiram Kotwal'


The respondents for this film are Dhananjay Kapse and Milind Wakankar.


Synopsis of Ghashiram Kotwal (1976/Marathi/107 mins)


Directors: K. Hariharan, Mani Kaul, Kamal Swaroop, Saeed Mirza
Cast: Mohan Agashe (Nana), Om Puri (Ghashiram Kotwal), Mohan Gokhale, Rajni Chauhan, and members of the Theatre Academy Pune.


The year – 1976. The place – Pune. Fifteen students from the FTII – four directors, four cinematographers, four sound recordists, three editors and one actor (under the mentorship of the senior director Mani Kaul) decided to form a Film Collective – a rare event in the history of Indian cinema – and embarked on the project of making a film “inspired by” Vijay Tendulkar’s play Ghashiram Kotwal. For nearly 4 decades, the film was considered lost, with no surviving negative prints – not even in the National Film Archives in Pune. The Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin recently discovered that a print of the film had been archived when it had travelled to Germany for a screening in 1978.


The Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema notes, “This remarkable avant-garde experiment in collective film-making is based on one of the most celebrated plays in contemporary Indian theatre, staged in 1972 by the Theatre Academy, Pune (members of which participate in the film’s cast). The play used Marathi folk forms like the Gondhal and the Keertan in an elaborately choreographed musical featuring the legendary Nanasaheb Phadnavis, the prime minister of Peshwa Madhavrao II and the real power behind Maharashtra’s Peshwa throne (1773-97). The original play, a transparent allegory referring to Indira Gandhi’s reign, was adapted in order to comment on Maratha and Indian history, starting from the enthronement of the child Peshwa Madhavrao II, until the final decline of the empire and the arrival of the British (cf. Ramshastri, 1944). It presents the decadent Nanasaheb (Agashe) and his lieutenant Ghashiram (Puri), a Brahmin from Kanauj, whom he uses to mount a reign of terror in the capital city of Pune. The main plot concerns Nana’s spy network, the rout of the British at Wadgaon (1779), Ghashiram’s rise and his fall when Nana sacrifices him, and the popular revolt against Nana’s henchman leaving the prime minister (and true culprit) unscathed. The film’s main significance resides in the way it adapts theatre to investigate cinema itself, a point underlined by the chorus at the beginning of the movie and, at the end, the quote from Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969) as the sutradhara (chorus) suddenly enters into the present when a truck leaves the quarry.”


Dhananjay Kapse teaches at the Department of English, Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi. He has a long-standing interest in the poetics and politics of Indian performance.


Milind Wakankar teaches philosophy and literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and works on the Marathi and North Indian bhakti traditions. He has just completed a manuscript on ‘Religion and Primary Narcissism’.  




-  Rohit
---------------------
Regards,
Rohit Rellan
http://www.linkedin.com/in/rohitrellan


Follow me on TWITTER: twitter.com/rohitrellan
Be my friend on FACEBOOK:http://www.facebook.com/rohit.rellan
Skype :rohitrellan


#Shopify: A multi-channel sales platform made for you. With Shopify, selling your products in many places is every bit as simple as selling in one. Try Shopify #free for 14 days at http://bit.ly/2jtwi9r


Integrate your email marketing with social media, Facebook and Twitter - with Benchmark Email: http://bit.ly/1WkZoUL


Look forward to Mondays with workspace designed for fresh ideas, organic networking, and month-to-month flexibility. Book a tour at WeWork ! http://bit.ly/2vnqkYB