Down Melody Lane..::..Article on Films, Personalities, Music Reviews and More..

Painters and sculptors have been involved with cinema ever since its inception. There was an element of painting in the pioneering efforts of early film-makers such as the Lumiere Brothers. Painted curtains were used to create magic effects and regularly featured in the use of mise-an-scene.

Pioneers like Dadasaheb Phalke in our own country had a valid experience of painting. A little after him the young pair of Vishnupant Damle and Shekh Fatehlal entered the portal of the Maharashtra Film Company of Kolhapur. Its founder Babulal Painter is knows as one of our most renowned classical painter. Damle and Fatehlal were his disciples. However, when they founded the Prabhat Film Company in 1929, only Fatehlal continued to paint the sets, while Damle gradually veered away to mechanical aspects of film-making.

One still remembers from one's childhood, photographs of Baburao Painter perched on wooden scaffolding in Shalini studio giving finishing touches to a big Himalayan backdrop meant for his mythological film, Usha. For Painter there was no difference between painting and cinema. Both were the means of creating trop d'oeil effects. It was the magic of the visual world which was at the centre of both the métiers.

But over the years specialization has cut apart art and the cinema. The moulding departments of companies such as Prabhat, housed in spacious studios in Pune, approximated the practice of sculpture. Kanu Desai, who created the décor of Vijay Bhatt's Bharat Milaap and Ram Rajya, was in the 1940s as reputed an artist as Baburao Painter. He belonged to a brilliant tradition of classical art from Gujarat. His sets in these mythological films are full of sculpted mouldings rarely equaled later in commercial cinema.

The set designer retained his importance for a long time. We have opulent historical films such as Mughal-e-Azam bearing testimony to the expertise of the classical designer. But these were the last expressions. It was only a few decades later that the importance of the studio indoor designer was undermined. We no doubt still have typically grandiose sets in ambitious films. Even British films made in India, like A Passage to India, offer specimens of some very atrocious designing in its scenes of Indian holy idols. Today the designing scene is very confusing, indeed.

Fatehlal, Damle & M F Hussain

Today the relationship between the artist and cinema appears to have taken a different turn. The first and foremost example we have before us is that of the late Satyajit Ray. Born in 192, Ray trained in art in Shanti Niketan. He developed into one of our finest draughtsman. His line in illustration was unique, supple and strong. In Calcutta, Ray joined the advertising agency of D. J. Keymer as art director. They sent him to their London head office. It was during this stint Ray conceived his first film, Pather Panchali.

For every film after that Ray prepared scores of line drawings mapping out the set designs and lighting patterns. Besides the very direction of his films suggested to us that they were handled by a pictorial artist. It is not without reason that Ray operated the camera himself. The second example is little different. It is that of the painter Maqbool Fida Hussain, who is five years older than Ray. When Pather Panchali was made in 1955, Hussain created brilliant series of painting based on the film. One particularly remembers the strong bullock image from this series at it was exhibited at the Babubhai Memorial Institute in Bombay early in 1956.

Hussain has been film-oriented all his life. During his boyhood in Indore he used to skip classes and ride his bicycle to a cinema house. He speaks glowingly of such early Prabhat classics as Ayodhyecha Raja and Maya Machhindra. Hussain used to make detailed notes about these films. One of the films that affected him deeply was Rembrandt, made by Alexander Korda with Charles Lughton playing the role of the legendary Dutch painter.

Hussain then toyed with the idea of coming to Bombay and joining the film industry as a set designer. However, he began instead to paint cinema hoardings. There is evidence to show that Husain had started painting these hoarding while in Indore itself. He came to Bombay in 1937 and struggled working as an ordinary cinema hoarding painter.

Another Indore painter, a lesser known one, also came to Bombay later in the 1970s and joined the Hindi film industry as a set designer. This is Manzoor, who has a brief but notable stint while simultaneously painting canvases and holding shos in Bombay. Unfortunately, his name has long ago been obliterated from the records of set designing in our films.

When Jehangir Bhownagary was at the Films Division in the late '60s, he instituted a revolutionary new policy under which artists were asked to make short films. Hussain made Through the Eyes of a Painter in 1967. His first film, this is a vibrant collage of vignettes of rural Rajasthan. It employs such indigenous symbols as a Rajasthani shoe, a lantern and an umbrella in a highly innovative way. This film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film festival. Hussain later made short films on his own, often handling the camera himself. But these are raw efforts and do not compare well with the film he made for Films Division.

In the scheme initiated by Bhownagary, Tyeb Mehta made Koodal. This focuses on an image central to Mehta's painting; that of a trussed up bull being taken for killing in an abattoir. The bleak interiors of abattoir are dramatically captured by Mehta. His symbolism is as subtle as that of Hussain's. Yet another series of his, The Diagonal, has influenced one of the key sequences in this film in which he himself appears. Koodal has music composed by Dr. V. K. Narayana Menon and uses an unforgettable mridangam performance by Palghat Raghu. The film won a national award n 1971.

Awareness of film, however, is seen in a number of contemporary painters. Artists like Gaitonde have readily absorbed the film art of Satyajit Ray and of such western film-makers as Bunuel and Godard. It is always a pleasure to talk to Bombay based Laxman Shreshtha who knows about Hollywood actors like Stacey Keach. Watching quality films is an obsession with Shreshtha and this has made his painting richer and more meaningful in a tangential manner.

However, this is not a common trend. The commercial line between art and cinema is thinner that that between theatre and cinema or between TV and cinema. Artists who see films are found to be extremely discriminating. On the other hand, we find Hussain enjoying the mainstream film Lamhe, which he saw eight times. This is because Hussain's roots as a hoarding painter are in popular Hindi Cinema. One of the first hoardings, put up at Minerva cinema on Lamington Road was for a New Theatres film starring Jamuna, P. C. Barua and Saigal, all of whom he had painted on the canvas.

Perhaps when we speak of films and paintings we are speaking of incompatibles. The elder painter Bal Chhabra speaks of his very first film called Do-Raha made nearly 45 years ago in which he employed Hussain to double for the painter shown in the film, Contemporaries like sculptor Bakre and painter Hazarnis helped make the sets. How nostalgic this story makes us, and how we wish we could go back to the days when rapport between film and art was complete.