If you haven't seen this... - Must Watch Films by Deepa Rajan

DO BIGHA ZAMIN (1953)

Director: Bimal Roy

Producer: Bimal Roy; Screenplay: Hrishikesh Mukerjee; Photography: Kamal Bose; Editor: Hrishikesh Mukerjee; Music: Salil Chaudhury.

Cast: Balraj Sahni (Sambhu); Nirupa Roy (Paro); Rattan Kumar.

Awards: Prix Internationale at the 1954 Cannes film festival, Prize for Social Progress at the Karlovy Vary film festival.

In a cinema that is largely associated with merry-making, impassioned love stories and adventure, Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin is a path-breaking dedication to realism. This 1953 film is a decidedly socialist narrative of an agrarian society slowly been taken over by industrialization and commercialization and the vices that accompany it.

On the surface, the film is a simple portrayal of the woes of the Indian farmer. Peasant farmer Sambhu’s meager ‘do bigha’, comes in the way of the landlord's scheme to sell a large parcel of the farm land to speculators.  The landlord fabricates evidence of an unpaid debt, forcing the farmer to abandon his family and leave for the city to repay the mountain of debt. Roy's use of the familiar musical and melodramatic style enabled audiences to comprehend his film; but his endeavor was markedly different in that it was strongly influenced by the Italian neo-realist Cinema of Rossellini and De Sica. Roy uncompromisingly injected naturalistic elements that prepared the ground for the more unflinching, innovative political cinema of the 1970s.  Every character in the film is a stark representation of a social class - Balraj Sahni as the poor farmer who considers his land to be his mother, Nirupa Roy as the illiterate, strong yet helpless wife and mother, Rattan Kumar as the child witness to the trials his father goes through in the city, the avaricious landlord, and the dying father whose only wish is to see his son save his land. Drawing from De Sica’s masterpiece Bicycle Thieves (1949), the city is depicted as a labyrinthine maze that literally consumes Sambhu’s idealistic aspirations. The chiaroscuro lighting of rickshaw-pullers quarters in Calcutta sends forth a silent yet powerful message of dilapidation and destruction of those who cannot keep pace with the consuming life in an urban jungle.

The narrative of impoverished farmers and avaricious landlords and moneylenders has been told time and time again in Hindi cinema. What makes Do Bigha Zamin such a powerful film is the pessimistic ending where Sambhu and his family look on despairingly at the image of a factory being built on the land stolen from them.  The denial of any kind of satisfying resolution to Sambhu’s poverty is a moving confirmation that social oppression is something monolithic, inevitable and hegemonic. Five decades later, Indian agriculture is still struggling against indebtedness, land-grabbing and crop failure.

 As the citizens of a country where agriculture continues to be an unreliable mainstay for millions, and where the farmer’s burden is one which he has been carrying for well over a century, Do Bigha Zamin is simply, a must-watch.

DR STRANGELOVE OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Producer: Stanley Kubrick, Peter George and Terry Southern; Story: Peter George (Novel)

Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott. Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens

Awards: 4 BAFTA awards, best written American comedy award from the Writers Guild of America.
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is based on a single fail-safe principle of good comedy: people who are trying to be humorous are never even as remotely funny as people trying to be serious and failing. In arguably one of the best political satires till date, Kubrick maximizes on rudimentary props, a small cast and a modest special effects to deliver a hilarious adaptation of Peter George's Cold War thriller novel Red Alert.  The story involves an unbalanced United States Air Force general Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden)who orders a first strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. Chaos ensues and the narrative continues to the ‘war room’ at The Pentagon where the President of the United States , his advisors, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Royal Air Force (RAF) officer try to recall the crew of the B-52 bomber aircraft to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. When the Soviet Premier reveals that that their country has deployed a doomsday device, the President proceeds to call upon the sinister Dr. Strangelove, a former Nazi and weapons expert.

Dr Strangelove is marked by excellent comic performances, which is just as well because there is so little in the film apart from faces, gestures and words. George C. Scott’s facial gymnastics make him surprisingly convincing as the over-the-top and patriotic General Buck Turgidson. Peter Sellers effortlessly portrays three distinct characters in the film, that of RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, ineffective President Merkin Muffley as well as the titular role. And it is Dr. Strangelove that truly stays behind with the audience, with his weird accent and gloved hand that seems to be a deadly weapon on its own, often springing into Nazi salutes and trying to strangle Strangelove to death.

It is not, however, just the comic elements of the film that make it a must-watch. The film takes potshots at numerous Cold War attitudes- especially that of mutual assured destructionDr. Strangelove humorously but effectively pulled the rug out from under the Cold War by arguing that if a “nuclear deterrent'' destroys all life on Earth, it is hard to say exactly what was being deterred.