Those who have watched "Miss Lovely" can’t forget the plaintive imagery created by Ashim Ahluwalia. More than the narrative structure, it was the images and production design that told us the emotional upheaval of characters . So it is only natural that in his next creative pursuit he has collaborated with Akbar Padamsee the last modernist in the world of visual arts, in recreating Padamsee’s lost experimental film, "Events In A Cloud Chamber". In 1969, Padamsee created an abstract landscape through drawing, shapes made out of stencils and photographic slides. The film’s only print travelled to Delhi Art Expo in the early 1970s and got mysteriously vanished.
Padamsee, 89, has stopped painting and remembers little about his experiments with cinema, the other being Syzygy , which befuddled most with its abstraction. For Ahluwalia it was the start of a different kind of cinema that could never fructify. So he went back to the drawing board with Padamsee to recreate the lost avant garde experience in around 23 minutes. Ahluwalia is not new to documentary format. John & Jane , his observational documentary on call agents won a National Award.
Edited excerpts:
What was the catalyst?
When I met Akbar Padamsee, he was 87 years old. I knew he was one of the pioneers of Indian modernist painting but I had no idea that he had made these two forgotten experimental films. He had stopped painting and was really keen to collaborate on a film after a gap of almost 45 years. I really wasn't sure what we could do together until he just happened to tell me about his second film – "Events in a Cloud Chamber". After just a handful of screenings, this film was shipped to an art expo in Delhi in the 70s where it was misplaced. There was no negative and the film is now long lost. This could have been the start of an entirely different kind of cinema in India but I suppose that was never meant to be. I wanted him to try and remember this film so that we could both attempt to make it again. I didn't want that period and this kind of cinema to be forgotten.
From where did you source the opening scenes? Do they advertently/ inadvertently become symbolic of events in some other cloud chamber!
The opening scenes are actually from an almost completely decayed 8mm home movie shot by my grandfather in the late 1940s. Most of the emulsion had come off, so at first it looks like a painted experimental film or something like that. But then you suddenly see ghostly images that come through – long dead relatives, kids playing, barely recognisable figures – like some phantom signals from the past. It was eerie and felt right to use as the opening. Since Events is about a "lost film" it just seemed natural to use other "lost" pieces of celluloid. I do think they evoke something otherworldly in a way.
It unravels like a mood piece which makes us understand the artist without simplifying the process. How did you decide on the form?
Yes, I really didn’t want to make a traditional "talking heads" documentary because it didn’t conjure much. I wanted to get into the artist and his world on a more immersive level – more open ended, more poetic maybe. So the film has a more dreamlike feel, despite the fact that it is technically a "documentary" but it doesn’t look like one you’ve seen before.
Was it difficult to convince Akbar Padamsee, who is known to be reticent, and you have captured him in some of his vulnerable moments?
He’s very reserved, but I think he was excited to collaborate on a film after so many decades. I’m not sure why but we shared a certain chemistry. He communicates very silently, doesn’t speak much. I was really nervous to show him the finished film because it does make him look very fragile, very vulnerable – it’s not a film that hypes him at all. After a few days he called me and told me he loved it very much and it was one of the most beautiful things he had seen. He was so generous and it’s probably the most I’ve heard him speak. I was stunned because he normally says so little. It was probably the highlight of making this film. He’s an incredibly humble, amazing human being.
But then what does he mean by ‘Hebbar, Chavda were appreciated by children’. Is he being sarcastic about the art scene?
Yes, I think he’s being quite funny there actually. He didn’t think too much of the art scene, and still doesn’t.
Unlike Husain, he has not put obvious labels on his inspirations from Indian mythology...
No, he doesn’t explain his own work much.
Do you identify with Akbar’s works? Perhaps for you art is a dialogue with yourself as well….
I don’t really know enough about his painting or modern Indian art in general. But yes, I like his line "art is a dialogue with myself" – I think there is a connection between us there. I like how, for him, all his art is mainly about the process of making it. He doesn’t wait for an "outcome" – praise, publicity, awards, fame, money, etc are all secondary.
For you sound is important but perhaps for him it is not as important…is it a right observation?
That could be true, but I can’t say for sure because the original soundtrack of "Events" was destroyed – and it was supposedly an electronic score made by an Indian woman (Geeta Sarabhai) composer in the 1960s. That sounds pretty inspired! We have female electronic music artists or DJs in India now and feel like something radical is happening, but this was 45 years ago – think about that!
How did you bring together the source material like Geeta Sarabhai’s recording or FFI’s documentary on Akbar?
It was a long process of digging around in various archives and calling everyone who ever remembered Akbar’s filmmaking. But I love doing this kind of stuff. It probably took about six months.
Did you recreate the film in exactly the same way Akbar conceived it or some technical liberties were taken ?
We used the same technology – 16mm film, carousal slide projector, coloured gels from a normal stationary shop, black paper stencils. All very lo-fi and analogue. But the main thing is that no one knows what Padamsee’s film really looks like, even he isn’t clear anymore. There weren’t more than a handful of screenings before the only print was lost. There are no photographs of it; and if there were preliminary diagrams or stencils, none have survived. The sound tape has deteriorated so no soundtrack is audible. The nearest we have to a direct visual record is the badly printed invitation of a screening with a date and time mentioned. In this scenario, it’s difficult to tell the real from the imagined anymore.
What was Mohanan’s (Ashim’s trusted cinematographer) reaction when you tried to piece the painting together for the film?
He thinks I’m insane, which is always gratifying. He was shooting with Shah Rukh Khan the day before on Raees – like with a crew of hundreds. And the next day it was just him, me and Kabir, my assistant, shooting Events . We were using a Nizo Super 8 camera from the 1970s that would barely turn on, and it was his first time. He was a virgin to Super 8 despite having shot on almost every other format. There was no eyepiece on the camera, no way to focus it, no way to tell if the film cartridge was even exposed. Process though – it’s about the magic of not being in control! That’s what I love about him, he totally gets where I’m going.
Why do you think we don’t have a tradition of experimental films? Will someone still advise aspirin before a screening of Syzygy !
Probably. The reason is that in India we only have a plot-orientated film tradition, but most experimental film is not so interested in storytelling and more in the medium of cinema itself – light, sound, texture, tone, things that are closer to painting or poetry perhaps. So there are a lot of reasons why. But there is a contemporary experimental film movement now, even though it’s very small – filmmakers like Natasha Mendonca, Amit Dutta, Vipin Vijay and Ashish Avikunthak are creating a space.
What are your plans with the film?
I felt this film was more suited to working with an art gallery as producer and distributor. The gallery, Jhaveri Contemporary, is keen to do a show in November where they will screen the film over the course of a week. Events in a Cloud Chamber is, after all, about a painter who happened to make some of the most radical films in this country, so maybe after all these decades; we kind of managed to find his work a home.
