Karnad, Bendre and Kuleshov...

Girish Karnad

Girish Karnad made his documentary film 'D R Bendre' (Da. Ra. Bendre) in the year 1972, fifty years after Robert Flaherty made one of the first long documentary narratives in USA called 'Nanook of the North'. Flaherty's silent film had, over an entire season, captured the life of Nanook and his family in the hostile terrain of the arctic. The film claimed to be anthropological in nature, shows us the 'reality' of the Eskimo community. But it is obvious that events shown in the film were staged, not by using professional actors but by deploying 'real' life characters and 'real' locations.

Forty three years before Karnad made 'D R Bendre', Dziga Vertov filmed 'The Man with the Movie Camera' in the erstwhile Soviet Union, portraying a day in the life of a city. This silent film is a representative of what is called the 'Kino-Pravada' group of films made by Dziga Vertov and his associates. In Russia 'Kino' means eye and 'Pravada', 'truth'. Dizga Vertov went out on the streets with his equipment to capture fragments of 'actuality' and then edited them into a rhythm to create a newly constructed 'truth' that he claimed was not visible to the naked eye.  The involvement of the constructor was never hidden.

Full film without subtitles

Twelve years before 'D R Bendre' was made, Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, having access to new light weight camera and sound equipment went into the streets of Paris to ask people if they were happy. The film they made out of such footage is called 'Chronicles of a Summer'; it uses the 'Cinema Verite' style of film making, verite is  'truth' in French. The usage of available lights, location sound and an extremely active involvement of the directors who showed themselves up on film to actively guide its course marked the salient features of this style.

And finally three years before Karnad made 'D R Bendre', in 1969 Albert and David Maysles came up with a documentary film called 'The Salesmen' in USA, which is seen as a representative film of 'Direct Cinema'. It has a style where the camera and the mike quietly observed the life around them, without an active interference of the directors; it was as if the directors were a fly on the wall looking at 'reality' a  from a distance. The film unobtrusively followed the lives of a few coffee book table bible salesmen engaged by the church.

The history of documentary movie making in fact is the history of how we look at the 'real' or how we are getting into the 'truth' in the making process.  

Satish Bahadhur, the father of post independence Indian film appreciation courses, used to show Karnad's 'D R Bendre' in the  courses that he used to conduct at Heggodu village in Karnataka during the early eighties. I first saw the film in once such course. I am not sure if the idea of showing hte film came from Bahadur saab or from K V. Subanna, the main force behind the Heggodu cultural experiment that included not only the film appreciation courses, but also a theater institute, a theater repertory and a publishing house. An analysis of a film on a local poet made by a local film director who is also a towering literary figure actually helps.

Da Ra Bendre, the Kannada poet

The film 'D R Bendre' is a short introduction to the master Kannada poet Dattatraya Ramchandra Bendre. It follows what documentary film theoretician Bill Nichols calls the oft used 'expository' mode of film making. Expository is 'intended to explain or describe something'. This mode of documentary film making is about a hundred years old, and over the years it has become the default form for documentaries. Many a film maker, including yours truly, is guilty of getting sucked into this dominant mode of expression of documentary movie making. This mode normally contains a point of view or an argument that is most often voiced by a 'god like' narrator who is spoon feeding the audience. This view point is seen as the 'reality' that is being portrayed. Girish Karnad himself is this 'god like' narrator in 'D R Bendre'. Everything else - the visuals and the sounds - supplements the argument that this voice makes.

For the record, the voice-over is written by Keertinath Kurthakoti. It seems to be of high literary value and the same could probably be read on a stage as an introduction to D R Bendre, in any seminar on him, as a short essay. It is also no coincidence that the expository mode of documentary film making is also sometimes called an essay film. The argument made through the narration in this film follows this regular pattern - an introduction to the topography of Dharwad, Bendre's place in the unique multicultural world of Dharwad, Bendre's childhood, Bendre's inspirations in life for his poetry, the mixture of the two cultures of Marathi and Kannada imbibed within Bendre, Bendre's family life, his messy immediate personal lifestyle accompanied by his varied subject interests, the manifestation of the concept of motherhood in his work and finally, Bendre's poetic worldview. Except for the last part which is in Bendre's own voice in the form of an interview, everything else is guided through the 'godly' voice-over.

Within this line of argument and prodding them up are the rest of the elements in the film that runs for about nineteen minutes. The opening shots are of a young boy who is crudely humming a popular Bendre poem almost to himself as he herds his cows amidst the wide landscape of rural Dharwad. Just when you think that you could be in for some 'real' stuff of the Dziga Vertov kind, there comes the next cut which is a zoom back from a gramophone playing the same song in a small tea stall. Although the transition is effective, it is evident that the whole thing is a staged set up a la 'Nanook of the North'.  This shot sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Opening Sequence

The mobility and liberation of the camera that we see in the first cowherd sequence, in the landscape shots of Dharwad, or in the shots in its market area quickly vanishe as the film progress. All of them, ably shot by the ace camera person Govind Nihalani, look conceptually planned to the tee and thus, rigid. They could well have been shot with multiple instructions being given to the 'real' actors who are playing themselves in 'real' locations. It is to the credit of Vikas Desai and Aruna Raje, the duo that edited this film on a crude editing machine called 'Union Table' at their house in Mumbai, that the overtly voice over based film is spaced out with sequences where we could just dwell on to grasp the beauty of the landscape, of the public spaces like markets, the town lanes, of the rains etc. Karnad also used Bendre's own poems to punctuate the narrations - some in his own voice, some professionally sung and some in Bendre's voice. 

Also filling up the gaps in the voice-overs is the overwhelming and overbearing music composed by Bhaskar Chandravarkar; it fills up the audio track when there are no poem recitations or all knowing narrations. The few places where there are no music are sequences which have sync sound - mainly when we see Bendre talking about his poems or reciting them.  Otherwise, the element of atmospheric sounds seem to be entirely missing in the film. Chandravarkar's music - albeit pleasing - almost conceptually covers up for the lack of these sounds. How one longed to hear the sound of the mooing cows, the chirping birds, the shouting children, the running cart, the flowing stream, the thundering rains etc... when the visuals lent themselves to such audio usage.  

In the film appreciation course that I attended in Heggodu some thirty five years back, Satish Bahadhur and I think even Subanna spoke highly about one particular sequence in 'D R Bendre'.  I shall call the sequence the 'mango vendor sequence'. It was termed as the cinematic highlight of the film. After the voice-over bestows on us information on how Bendre used to take inspiration from the day to day people that he met to write his poems, Karnad plays a pre recorded Bendre poem as the background music. A rough translation is given below. 

ಟೊಂಕದ ಮ್ಯಾಲ ಕೈಯಿಟಗೊಂಡ ಬಿಂಕದಾಕಿ ಯಾರ ಇಕಿ  (Who is this damsel who has her hands on her waist ? )

ವಂಕಿ ತೋಳ ತೋರಸತಾಳ ಸುಂಕದ ಕಟ್ಟೆವಂಗ (She who is showing off her  arms adorned with armlets to the collector..)

ಎಣ್ಣಾ ಮಾವ ಅನಕೋತ ಬಣ್ಣದ ಮಾತನಾಡಕೋತ (She who sweetly speaks using words like  brother and uncle..)

ಕಣ್ಣಾಗ ಮಣ್ಣ ತೂರುವಾಕಿ ಸಣ್ಣನ ನಡದಾಕಿ (She whose has a slender midriff pulls the wool over one's eyes... )

The reality

The imagination

At his house gate Bendre is talking to a middle aged rustic lady mango vendor who is filmed in the harshness of the afternoon natural light. This deftly edited sequence does not use sync sound, so we just assume that that the conversation that they are having is for a possible mango sale. Instead of the sync sound, the pre recorded song of the above poem is used over these visuals. And suddenly, in a jiffy of an editing cut, the 'real' middle aged rustic lady vendor who is lowering her mango basket onto the ground becomes a well lit elegant 'imaginary' young lady who enticingly is showing off her mangoes - in close ups and extreme close ups - to Bendre. These shots are inter-cut with mid shots of Bendre who is looking at the 'imaginary' lady, it would seem for quite some time. After a few seconds, the young lady picks her basket and again in a jiffy of an editing cut, we see the 'real' middle aged rustic lady walk away with her basket. The poem ends.

Realistically, Bendre in his mid shots has no expression whatsoever on his face. It seems as though he was asked to look in a particular direction while the shot was taken, and that he did so. However since these these shots of Bendre are edited with the sensuous 'imaginary' lady looking longingly at him, it unintentionally looks as if Bendre is 'ogling' at the female fruit vendor. About a century ago, Soviet film maker Lev Kuleshov once filmed an actor who had no expression on his face. He then edited the same shot separately with a beautiful girl, a dead body and a plate of soup. The audience interpreted the sequences as the actor expressing lust, sorrow and hunger respectively. Bendre unwittingly had becomes a part of Karnad's (unintended?) Kuleshov experiment.

Shot 1

Shot 2

Shot 3

That apart, as the film's co-editor Aruna Raje opines, the picturisation of the song does not do justice to the rich imagery that the poem itself evokes. Abstract words, having concrete signs and meanings, have immense possibilities of imagery when placed together in a certain way. In cinema, the images themselves are concrete, and thus they have a definite fix to them. The signs themselves are the meanings, so to say. By the means of the devices Karnad has used to shoot the poem, has fixed his imagery / interpretation of the song and thus limited himself to one particular evocation that creates an 'ogling' Bendre. And I am not getting into the ethics of assigning non existing intentions to real life people and portraying them as 'real'.

Karnad's 'D R Bendre' is a constructed reality like 'The Man with the Movie Camera', but it does not have the rigor of the cinematic language that the latter has. Karnad's 'D R Bendre' aped the shooting techniques of 'Nanook of the North' in terms of its re-enactment with real characters to suggest the 'real', however it does not have the depth that latter has. Karnad's 'D R Bendre' is not observational in nature like 'The Salesmen'. Karnad guides the narrative of 'D R Bendre', but unlike the directors of 'The Cornicals of a Summer' and 'The Man with a Movie Camera', he does not come to the foreground and own up such a thing. In other words, he does not overtly state that the reality that he is showing is his reality. It is thus implied that what he is actually showing is 'the' reality. That is an inherent danger of the 'expository mode' or the 'essay film'.

May be Bill Nichols was just trying to formulate his theory on documentary film making while Karnad was making 'D R Bendre'.

Poem Transcription: Jayalakshmi Patil.