BackRevisiting an experiment
Ashim Ahluwalia recreates modernist painter Akbar Padamsee's experimental film lost over 40 years ago
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India’s experimental cinema might have been very different had modernist painter Akbar Padamsee been a little more careful with his film Events In A Cloud Chamber, which was screened at the opening of Metascapes, a 1974 exhibition of oil paintings at Mumbai’s Pundole Art Gallery. Certainly, film-maker Ashim Ahluwalia, known for his critically acclaimed film Miss Lovely, is convinced of this.
Last year Ahluwalia met the 87-year-old artist, who was part of the Progressive Artists Group—which included M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta and F.N. Souza—and discovered that he had tried his hand at film-making in the late 1960s-early 1970s. However, Padamsee received neither audience nor encouragement. His first, Syzygy, made with a fellowship granted by the Jawaharlal Nehru Foundation in 1969-70, put forward “a theory towards programming forms" and showed dots, spaced out in accordance with a fixed code, being connected in a myriad ways—Jean Bhownagary, a former head of the Films Division, warned audiences at a screening to take an aspirin before viewing it.
By the time Padamsee made Events In A Cloud Chamber, an intricately made film about a painting, he knew he didn’t have an audience for his experiments with the medium. After holding a handful of screenings, including at Pundole, the artist lent the film to someone—he doesn’t recall whom—and never got it back. The film was made as a positive print, and there were no copies.
“This was renegade stuff," says Ahluwalia who, through conversations with Padamsee, pieced together what the film was about despite the latter’s fading memory. “We can talk about Om Dar- Ba-Dar or Mani Kaul films, but these are still narrative feature films, traditional art-house cinema. Padamsee’s films don’t bother with format, length, characters, story or even people—his films are pure abstraction, pure form. Losing this mysterious film was sad. It’s like a rare, spectral trace of India’s forgotten avant-garde cinema."
This is what led Ahluwalia to make a film with—and, in some ways, about—Padamsee. He called it Events In A Cloud Chamber (2016) to show not just a continuity with a lost strand of experimental film-making, but also his affinity to Padamsee’s experiments.
Mumbai-based Jhaveri Contemporary gallery showed Ahluwalia’s 23-minute-film at the Dhaka Art Summit in February and, more recently, at Art Dubai, which ends today. It is slated to be shown at the gallery in July or August.
The film begins with a distortion of images in visuals reminiscent of experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage. You can make out faint shapes—two children, a mother, perhaps—and then, with Padamsee describing his childhood in voice-over, we are shown scenes from a home video. In an autobiographical twist, Ahluwalia uses footage of a home video shot by his grandfather, who didn’t know Padamsee, but like him, lived in cosmopolitan Bombay of the 1950s and 1960s.
Ahluwalia also uses footage from Films Division documentaries of the time, including a memorable shot of a woman nodding off to sleep in a movie theatre. And then, like a revelation, scenes from Syzygy fill the screen. The vision of the artist, exploring form—this concern dominated much of Indian modern art and gave rise to some of its finest works—is an eye-opener. And yet, as the anecdote with Bhownagary suggests, no one realized its importance, least of all Padamsee. “I didn’t realize it. In fact I was quite flattered that you gave it so much importance," he tells Ahluwalia in the film.
The subterranean culture of meaning-making often throws up great surprises. One such surprise awaits the viewer of this film: We learn that the late Gita Sarabhai, a pakhawaj player and an inspiration for John Cage’s genre-defining musical work, 4’33", composed an electronic soundtrack for Padamsee’s Events. Ahluwalia managed to trace a spool of this soundtrack—titled Akbar Padamsee film—in her family’s archives, but it was so damaged that no music came forth from the spool.
Ahluwalia’s film, then, is not just about a lost film. It is also about the impermanence of memory and, at another level, about lost possibilities. “It was like going up to a point and then realizing that there is nothing there, says Ahluwalia. “I’m not trying to revive the past, but trying to look to the past to find inspiration because there were so many directions started (on) and never finished."
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