Kumar Shahani’s Cinema: How the Avant-garde Filmmaker Crafted Meaning Through Movement, Silence and Form
The HinduPublished : Nov 24, 2024 17:13 IST - 11 MINS READ I am no film critic. The symbolism in ‘Maya Darpan’ In his much-talked-about debut, Maya Darpan, as the credits roll up, the camera carefully introduces us to the lacklustre discoloured walls of the feudal mansion where a substantial part of the film is located with an incredible mixing of sound in the background; it is impossible to figure out what the sounds are or their source: maybe trains screeching and puffing, handloom shafts moving in a rhythm, yet the sounds in different pitch and intonation keep returning. When I use the term multilinguality in the context of Kumar’s films, I do not simply mean fluidity among human languages and paralinguistic features, which is indeed central. Kumar’s genius brings together sculpture, music, poetry, and dance, and the oral and the written through the multilinguality of the human body, its parts, and nature. This celebration of silence and speech, stillness and movement, the lyrical and earthly, colour and whiteness, and dance, music, and sculpture is seen in most of Kumar’s films.
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