Siliconeer April 2006

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Avant Garde Cinema: Filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak

Amid the overwhelming clout of Bollywood and multiplexes, Ashish Avikunthak has dared to make avant garde, experimental films for 11 years. A Siliconeer report.

Within filmmaking traditions in India dominated by Bollywood and multiplex films, art films is almost an endangered species nowadays. If you consider experimental, avant-garde films — then you are talking about a species virtually non-existent in India.

Ashish Avikunthak is one such filmmaker. One of the foremost experimental short filmmakers in India, he has been making films for the past eleven years. His works have been showcased in films festivals around the world.

A man of many vocations, Avikunthak was raised in Kolkata, and he did his undergraduate degrees in social work and archaeology in Bombay and Pune University respectively. He worked as a political activist for the Narmada Bachao Andolan, a folklorist amongst the Warli tribal community in Maharashtra and as an archaeologist has been part of excavation projects in India, Italy and Peru.

Presently he is a doctoral student at Stanford University, finishing his dissertation on the archaeology of the Indus Civilization.

After a decade of making short films, Avikunthak has finished a Bengali feature-length experimental film, Formless Shadows (Nirakar Chhaya). The film is a cinematic interpretation of the Malayalam novella “Pandavpuram” by Setu Madhavan. It explores the psychological universe of a lonely woman abandoned by her husband, awaiting a paramour who she imagines will rescue her from the mundane ennui of her daily existence and bring passion into her forlorn life. This yearning stems from both her emotional need to overcome loneliness and a suppressed sexual desire. As the yearning translates into an imagined reality, the film travels through the life of this lonely woman, inhabited by a loving sister-in law and an imagined paramour. “Socially the film is a reflection on contemporary urban society in India which is increasingly faced with the problems of alienation arising from nuclear family units and rising levels of marital separation and abandonment,” Avikunthak says. “In the absence of the support of the larger joint family, this alienation can take on the nature of a psychosis. The film attempts to probe into the complexities of such a state, which blurs the boundaries between reality and imagination.” The film, shot in both black and white and color, is a melancholic contemplation upon the reality of the imagined world that the protagonist of the film creates. The narrative of the film constantly oscillates between real and non-real, heightened by the usage of both black and white and color images to produce an intense emotional experience exemplified by loss and pain.

“This film is an interplay about the subtext of desire and secrecy between friends which simultaneously threatens and bonds any relationship,” the filmmaker says. The cultural anthropologist in Avikunthak comes out as the films attempts to deal with cultural complexities relating to religion, sexuality, performance and political identity in postcolonial India.

Nirakar Chhaya, like Avikunthak’s earlier films, is a self-financed film made with his savings from the stipend he gets from Stanford University. “This is not a low-budget film, this is a no-budget film,” he notes wryly. The film was shot in Kolkata with a small group of professional cast and crew. “The technicians were friends from my FTII days and the actors were from the vibrant group theatre movement in Kolkata,” he explains. “These are people who believed in my vision of the film and were willing to work on the project without remuneration, driven by a belief in making a work of art.”

Shot in three weeks in October 2004, the film took nearly six months to edit because of its complex narrative structure. At the moment, Avikunthak is working with an award-winning Stanford University composer laying the music of the film and doing its sound design. He hopes to get the film ready by the end of this year for the festival circuit next year.

Experimental films as a genre does not have existence in India in the way it does in Europe and the U.S. Nonetheless, there have been a few practitioners of this art form in the Indian government-run Films Division in the 1960s -70s. Early Indian parallel cinema directors in the 1970s like Mani Kaul, Kumar Sahani, G. Arvindan are considered by many film scholars to be filmmakers who were making avant garde narrative films. Almost all these film were funded by the National Film Development Corporation, various state governments and the Films Division.

With the advent of liberalization in 1991, the state-funded mechanism of funding art cinema died, and with it directors who were making parallel cinema faded away or were subsumed by all-powerful Bollywood. It was in this depressing context that Avikunthak started to make films.

Avikunthak considers himself as a “fringe of the fringe filmmaker.” Not only is he outside the ambit of mainstream filmmaking world, he claims he is not even part of the alternative documentary filmmaking community in India. He passionately notes, “I look at films as means of artistic creation driven by deep aesthetic processes, and not a means of entertainment like Bollywood or Hollywood does, nor a means of producing political propaganda as television documentary does.”

He says he is an outsider because he works not only outside the logic of commercial or art cinema in India, but also outside the framework of documentary films making tractions, which are supported by television grants or NGO money.

Then how does he make films? “That’s easy,” he confidently remarks, “I make films using my own savings; people buy houses and cars, I make films.”

A self-taught filmmaker, Avikunthak never went to a film school, but started making films while he was doing his MA in archaeology in Pune, in 1995. He worked with filmmaker friends at the neighboring Film and Television Institute of India, assisted them on their student films, watched classics of world cinema and learnt the craft hands-on. The first film he made was a single shot, single take, conceptual film that shows a man walking nude in a derelict landscape for nine minutes. Shot on 16mm, during the pre-digital days, Ashish made this film with a small sum of Rs. 7,000 that he had saved from writing articles for local newspapers.

He has come along way since then. He has made more than half a dozen short films and two videos that have been shown in various film festivals throughout the world In London, New York, Los Angles, Paris, Brussels. One of them, Kalighat Fetish (Kalighat Atikatha) won a top award in 2001 at the Tampere Film Festival, Finland, one of the biggest short film festivals in the world. His films have been showcased at retrospectives of Indian experimental and documentary films in Brussels, and he was recently invited in February 2006, to an avant-garde film festival in Lyon, France — Les Inattendus, a premier experimental film festival in Europe which honored him with a retrospective of his work.

Avikunthak’s films are experimental in the sense that they are not about story telling but about image making. “They are about producing ephemeral experiences, and not about telling a linear story with a beginning, middle and an end,” he explains. These are experimentations with both form and narrative, and consist of powerful images tied together in a cohesive montage, through which a cinematic experience is conveyed rather than a story told. Avikunthak conceives of films as a series of images rather than a story or a narrative, but is driven by a thematic focus, which are usually conceptual in nature. For example, Kalighat Fetish deals with the ceremonial performance of male devotees cross-dressing as Kali, interwoven with grotesque elements of a sacrificial ceremony, which forms a vital part of the worship of the goddess. This film is an attempt to negotiate with the duality that is associated with the ceremonial veneration of the Kali, the presiding deity of Kolkata. Avikunthak clarifies that “this film is an exploration of the sexual subtext central to the Mother Goddess cult and ruminates on the nuanced trans-sexuality that is prevalent in the ceremonial performance of male devotees cross-dressing as Kali.”

Dancing Othello (Brihannala Ki Khelkali), made in 2002, a film Avikunthak made after he had come to the U.S., explores a moment of imaginative intersection of two seventeenth century classical artistic traditions — Shakespearean tragedy and South Indian dance Kathakali. The director’s statement of this film declares that this is a film in which “Shakespearean theatricality meets the subtlety of Kathakali, subverted in the dramatic space of street theatre to give birth to a performative ‘caliban’ — Khelkali — a hybrid act of articulating the post-colonial irony of contemporary India.”

His latest venture, a Hindi short film — End Note (Antaral) — was made last year and was recently shown as the Asian Short Competition at the Bangkok Film Festival in February this year and is scheduled to be shown in film festivals in Canada and Germany. This film is an abstract interpretation of one of Samuel Beckett’s shortest plays — “Come and Go.” Shot in Kolkata, this film deals with nostalgia and loss among three women who reminisce about their times at school and rekindle and affirm old friendships.

Avikunthak believes that he would have been able to complete Nirakar Chhaya, his first feature film, last year, but lack of funds, the impossibility of getting a commercial producer in India and the difficulty in getting grant money from a handful of international organizations delayed the completion.

At the moment he is still nearly $20,000 short and now looking for support. His friends are organizing fund-raising parties to help him raise funds to finish this film.