This text appeared within the April 25, 2025 version of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly publication that includes unique movie criticism and writing. Join the Letter right here.

Vakratunda Swaha (Ashish Avikunthak, 2010)

Prismatic Ground, the New York–primarily based competition of experimental documentary and avant-garde movie, is honoring Indian filmmakers Kumar Shahani and Ashish Avikunthak in its upcoming fifth edition. Shahani, who handed away in February 2024 at the age of 83, will likely be commemorated with a four-film retrospective, whereas Avikunthak will obtain the competition’s Ground Glass Award for “excellent contribution within the subject of experimental media.” The 2 filmmakers have extra in frequent than meets the attention.

Born in Larkana in current-day Pakistan and shifting to Bombay along with his household after the 1947 Partition, Shahani studied at the Film and Tv Institute of India in Pune, the place he got here below the tutelage of filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960) and Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi. One other affect encountered throughout his childhood was Robert Bresson, on whose A Mild Lady (1969) Shahani assisted whereas he was a visiting pupil at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris.

His first characteristic, Maya Darpan (1972), a formally rigorous portrait of a desolate girl wilting in a feudal mansion, was such a radical departure from the intellectually respectable idiom of neorealism that Satyajit Ray excoriated it for “threatening movie language with extinction.” With state funding of area of interest, commercially unviable titles changing into more and more tough, Shahani wouldn’t be capable to make one other characteristic for 12 years, inaugurating a working life marked by unrealized tasks and lengthy gaps between movies that he would fill with analysis, writing, and instructing. Throughout 4 many years, he would make not more than seven options, along with quite a few shorts.

Like Shahani, although a technology youthful, Avikunthak was additionally a toddler of Partition, born right into a Hindu household of Punjabi origin that moved from Pakistan to Calcutta, in India, after 1947. The place Shahani skilled the churn of Could 1968 throughout his time in Paris, Avikunthak credit his political consciousness to dwelling by way of the Hindu-Muslim riots of 1992-93 in Bombay. His physique of labor, spanning eight options and seven shorts together with Kalighat Fetish (1999) and Vakratunda Swaha (2010), demonstrates a devoted engagement with Hindu iconography. Avikunthak’s invocation of vernacular gods, typically visceral in its nudity and graphic violence, resists each the perversions of colonial puritanism and the up to date Hindu Proper’s consolidation of heterogeneous spiritual beliefs and practices within the subcontinent.

Shahani and, to a lesser extent, Avikunthak have each been related to the Parallel Cinema motion in India. However their high-modernist apply stands far faraway from the socially minded however formally conservative works that dominate the Parallel Cinema custom. In contrast to their friends, the 2 artists current their movies primarily as mental constructs undergirded by robust philosophical frameworks: a principle of the epic type within the case of Shahani, Tantric non secular thought for Avikunthak. Each defied the intuitive groping evoked by the phrase “experimental.”

Above all, Shahani’s and Avikunthak’s movies discover frequent floor of their rejection of the psychological realism that dominates classical narrative cinema. A Marxist by persuasion, Shahani framed his rejection in pointedly Brechtian phrases: “Realism of element,” he wrote, “generally is a masks for eluding the actual issues of society, its class relations.” Denying viewers cathartic immersion in a self-contained fictional world, Shahani as an alternative invited them to reach at a rational evaluation of the relations depicted in his movies. For Avikunthak, this rejection is a matter of non secular ritual. Emptied of particular person psychology, his human figures change into metaphysical automobiles embedded in predetermined textual and gestural transactions.

Audiences at Prismatic Ground could have the possibility to find two singular artists whose works, regardless of their seeming hermeticism, stand in severe dialogue with the politics of their instances.

Srikanth Srinivasan is a movie critic from Bangalore, India.