Indian Avant Garde written by Arko Bhattacharya

The Advent of Indian Avant Garde, Pramod Pati and Psychedelic Cinema

Avant garde. Though still not quite popular commercially, yet has increased its popularity among film lovers over the years. Now what exactly is Avant garde?

The term arose back in France in order to break the orthodox norms of the society. It was not only a simple term, but as a whole a revolution which gave birth to experimental, out of the box, unorthodox art form which was in no way following any grammar. In cinema, the rise of Avant garde happened with makers like Rene Clair or Erik Satie. The way of expression changed, metaphors increased, music became very different from conventional form, and people also started to mix several art forms together.

In cinema, fourth wall broke, experimental approach like stop motion increased, directors tried to incorporate nonsense in their art which actually made a lot of sense, and also usage of psychedelic visuals increased a lot. With time, the language of Avant garde evolved, and just because there was no barrier, it evolved very fast. From Rene Clair's "Entracte" to Luis Bununel and Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou" to Alejandro Jodorowsky's "El Topo" to Gasper Noe's "Climax", the film language changed and evolved lot within 100 years.

But that's not what I will be talking about. By the time European Avant garde started evolving, in India, cinema was just starting to gain prominence as a medium. The lack of exposure made Indians unaware of the term and the language of those films. Along with this, toppled the conservatism of sticking to the grammar. Altogether, Indian cinema was never into this Avant garde thing, till they were completely exposed to it around the mid 60s. Around 1965, the period of the India-Pakistan war, a period of inflation and unemployment in India, and a period before the emergency, the Indian art form got a kick. In this third decade of freedom, the political control over the commoners increased and the government started deciding what people should do and what not. This increased with Indira Gandhi taking up the throne as the 3rd Prime Minister, defeating Morarji Desai. The Indian Avant garde started beginning right there. Theatre started breaking norms, and so did (the not so mainstream) Indian cinema. In came two guys, SNS Sastry and Pramod Pati, of the Films Division.

Sastry was more direct in his experimental approach and his films were more into bridging the gap between documentary and narrative films, giving rise to docu-fictions like "I am 20" or "And I make Short films". But who shook me more was an animator from Orissa named Pramod Pati, who started creating experimental ventures which kept on breaking norms again and again. Usually concentrating on animation films, his first live action film "Explorer" in 1968 was the first film that I came across.

It was a time when I was gushing over the short films of David Lynch like "The Alphabet" or "Six Figures getting Sick" which were no less than masterclasses in experimentation. Lynch drew heavy influences from Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon", along with the Czech silent films of the early 40s like "Fifth Horseman is Fear". While working at Films Division, the same happened with Pati. He got introduced to the world of French and Czech Avant garde cinema, when he was busy experimenting with animation. Around late 1967, he did a different form of experiment and planned to release it in 1968, just 2 years after the first short film of David Lynch released. The 7 minutes long psychedelic short film "Explorer" is nothing short of a milestone in Indian cinema. Much before Kamal Swaroop's masterpiece "Om Dar B Dar", Pramod Pati's 'Explorer" merged reality with abruptness and nonsense.

It is a sequence of random shots and frames merged together o tell an unusual story of a country and its restless time. The endless rack focus, unorthodox background score, unusual title sequence, intercuts, sudden change in tempo, gives a perfect psychedelic experience. By the time the film ends, it will actually leave you trippy and if you want to experience that trip again, it will leave you wondering with a lot of questions. The film cannot be necessarily called subtle as it oscillates between nuance and direct statements. But has an organic humor and wit associated with it. One such moment in the film was a frame written "Fuck Censorship" all over it, where the word "Fuck" is censored to "F*CK". The film will make you smirk because it has several similar humor present in it inherently and once you get into its zone, there is no way out. This actually brings me back to Pati's favorite shot, which he carefully reuses in several films: rack focus. The endless rack focus with a static camera is somewhat very unlikely to be present in a psychedelic short film which is meant to be fast and moving, but it does successfully make you trip and give you some sense of discomfort. Even in "Abid", which Pati co-directs with Abid Surty (reminding me of Bununel and Dali), a painter, the usage of rack focus is even greater1 than "Explorer".

Merged with this, comes the eerie usage of background music which was way different from that of the scores designed in the majority of the late 60s Indian cinema in each of his films. From the stop motion live actions or animations like "Claxplosion" or "This, My India", or psychedelic films talking about life, science, religion, and politics, like "Abid", "Explorer" or "Trip", the background score also haunted the viewers along with the visuals. The unorthodox making though was not happily viewed by the people of that time. According to the veteran filmmaker Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, his films were "waste of public money".

Pati died early at a tender age of 42 in Mumbai, but the time he lived and the films he directed are getting recognized now. Not only his death, but also the inherent conservatism of artists made him one of the unsung heroes of Indian cinema. Till films division released his films, there was simply no existence of Pati within commoners, which now need to be circulated more among people for his excessive courage to experiment and desire to upgrade Indian animation and narrative film language.