The Art-House Party

In Kurosawa: The Last Emperor, Alex Cox's documentary on Akira Kurosawa, the great American auteur Francis Ford Coppola pays tribute to his Japanese counterpart: “One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn't make a masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made, you know, eight masterpieces.” Three of those masterpieces were screened to Bangalore audiences last week at the Akira Kurosawa film festival, jointly held by the Suchitra Film Society and Shemaroo Entertainment.

The festival opened, appropriately, with Rashomon, Kurosawa's cinematic treatise on the subjectivity of truth and perspective. Based on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's short fiction, Rashomon examines the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife from multiple angles, all told in flashback. Each of the five versions of the story – narrated by the two victims, the accused bandit, a priest and a woodcutter – claims to be the truth, and each contradicts the other. The only thing apparent by the end is that all involved have been motivated by self-interest, making it impossible to take sides with any one protagonist.

Rashomon was followed by Madadayo, a bittersweet chronicle of the life of Hyakken Uchida, a teacher and writer. It follows Uchida, an eccentric retired professor of German, as he advances in age, all the while sharing a close, paternal relationship with a group of his old students. Made in 1993, Madadayo is Kurosawa's final film.

Continuing the theme of fathers and sons, the festival ended with Ran, Kurosawa's loose historic biopic of the Japanese warlord Mōri Motonari, which also carries acknowledged influences of William Shakespeare's King Lear. One of the most expensive studio films produced in Japan at the time, Ran tells the story of a Lear-like nobleman named Hidetora who leaves the running of his kingdom to his three delinquent sons, only to see it destroyed by their inherited lust for power.

“Akira Kurosawa's greatest strength was his humanism,” says Girish Kasaravalli, acclaimed filmmaker and one of the trustees of the Suchitra Film Society. “He empathised with the plight of his characters. It couldn't have been easy making the kind of films he did back then. He began working in the studio era, you see, far before the advent of the independent cinema movement. There was a compulsion then to express oneself within a narrative-dramatic structure. But Kurosawa's cinema managed to trascend such constraints, and that's what makes him such an influence on later filmmakers – he was a technician and an artist combined, and a great one at that.”

Viewed as an exercise in curation, however, one would be hard-pressed to thematically classify the film festival. It followed neither a chronology, nor any readily identifiable artistic period in Kurosawa's life. Vidyashankar, the president of the Suchitra Film Society, candidly admits as much, when asked why they chose to screen these three films in particular. “It wasn't really meant to represent any specific aspect of Kurosawa's filmography. The idea was to sensitize audiences to his work. More primarily, the festival served to promote our partner Shemaroo's new world cinema DVDs.”

And this is perhaps the point really worth noting. The Indian market seems to have suddenly woken up to the allures of world cinema, especially over the last year or two. Moserbaer, Palador, and now Shemaroo, having acquired the rights to a buffet of auteur-driven parallel cinema, are flooding supermarkets and kirana stores with well-packaged, affordable and accessible titles. New television channels such as NDTV Lumiere and UTV World Movies, steadily rising in popularity among Indian viewers starved of intelligent programming, aid in virally marketing these films.

The one major problem art-house cinema has faced in the past, that of adequate distribution – and, thereby, public exposure – seems on its way to being solved collectively by proliferating cable television and the economy of producing DVDs. “In the 70s, you had to be a member of a film club to get to watch such quality cinema,” says Kasaravalli. “Now, the choices you have are fantastic. You can walk into a corner store and buy any movie you like, and these DVDs come with expert commentaries and remastered footage. If you are a film buff, these really are excellent times.”

Appearing today in The Hindu: Friday Review, Bangalore.