 Smoking causes cancer. Over a hundred years of Indian cinema, we have seen an emergence of a wide range of filmmakers, from commercial money-spinners to artistic maestros, but there have been few who have been able to challenge the very language and dialectics in which films are made and what they say. From Rinal Sen, the most important purpose of cinema is political commentary and documentation. Forming and then developing a cinematic style for him is the means to express ideas effectively through a medium of popular culture that connects with the people he is speaking to. I have a question and I think this is it. Look, when this poem is spoken, it is not me. I am not a star. I am not a big star. My name is Dhanjit Murali. I am a simple, clever servant. I am a tough person. I am a hard-working, clever servant. I am a hard-working, clever servant. I am a hard-working, clever servant. I am a hard-working, clever servant. They are very good. I think it is okay. They will not be able to hear anything before they enter the room. Look, do you understand? Who thinks that? I do not know anything. I will do it. Look, this is our cinema. This is my story, yours too. The Calcutta trilogy, as it is now called, is a combination of three films made by Sen between 1970 and 1973. Interview, Calcutta 71, and then Podhathik. During this time, the city was brought to a standstill by the far left radical communist movement, known as the Nuxulite Movement. And these films reflect sense politics explicitly. They follow a cerebral train of thought that first identifies the problems of an independent India and then explains why these problems have continued endlessly post-independence. The story in interview is of a young man who was advised to go for a job interview dressed in a suit. The interview is for a cushy post in an Amati national company. With much difficulty, he borrows a suit and sends it to the laundry. But unfortunately on the appointed day, the laundry is shut. So he has to go for the interview in the traditional Bengali attire of a Punjabi with Dhoti. And of course, he doesn't get the job dressed as he is. What Minal Sen says is that some 23 years after independence at that time, we were still ruled by a capitalist, neo-colonial economic structure. He wanted to show us how our polity has allowed one form of slavery to replace another. In Calcutta 71, which is made up of four stories woven into a single film, Sen gives us a glimpse into this elite and superficial Bengali society molded by foreign aspirations and contrasts it with the abject poverty in slums. In Padathik, Sen is at his best. When he makes a film, he says, In Podathik, Sen is at his best, when he makes a film about the government response to the Naxalites. A Podathik, a foot soldier, played by the actor Dhritman Chatterjee, is shifted to a safe house in an attempt to elude the police, who were staging encounters that were rapidly eliminating members of the radical leftist movement in Calcutta. While safe in the comfortable apartment of an advertising professional played by Simi Krival, he is surrounded by a bourgeois lifestyle and starts to rethink some of the political positions he earlier took for granted. Do you see this bird? A Chinese bird. Shobhi Baba. My brother. My younger brother. My only brother. Bishon Bright. In your presence, the first person you met, was a very different person, a group of people, a group of people, a group of people, independent. Baba was very much in a fight. And Bondudhir Baba was very sad. Bishon was very sad. I think, the other two had a very bad time. Then, one day, three years later, my brother left the house. Chandigarh. Punjab. Punjabi was gone for hours. He went to Calcutta. What was the name of Rupad? Rupad. From there, my brother wrote a letter to me. I don't have a sister-in-law. I don't have a sister-in-law. There are many people with me. Everyone in the world is dreaming of a society. The fight is going on. The fight is going on, people who can't fight, people who can't eat. People who fight, Africa, Latin America, people who have the most freedom, I want to ask. When the leader of the ideological movement, he belongs to, gets to hear of his reformist ideas, his severely reprimanded getting away from the party line. Here, clearly, Mrenal Zain is critical of the absence of democracy in such a radical leftist movement, pointing out a dictatorial leadership style. I was very close to the Marxist, literature, Marxist, we have live Marxist politics and all. And then now what I feel is that something needs to be questioned. You have to think primarily of man and his relationship with the society. And I find a lot of lapses, a lot of gaps in their thinking and their activities. Interestingly, Zain also shows how the leftist movement and Bengal was split down the middle. Between the CPIM, the Communist Party of India, Marxist, led by an urban older generation that wanted to participate in electoral politics, and a much more radical group that wanted a total revolution and an elimination of the existing political system. I'm not ashamed of being a pamphleteer if it makes a point. That was the time when there was a lot of unrest in Calcutta and I cannot just pull myself out of the atmosphere in which I grow, in which I weep, in which I get angry. So all that I did at that time, I wanted to point my accusing finger at the enemy outside. That was when I brought the physical reality very close to me. I used to bring the physical reality onto the screen when I could see a government has come to stay with a lot of lofty promises, but they couldn't deliver the goods the way I thought it would be. And that was the time when instead of pointing my finger at the enemy outside, I wanted to point my finger at the enemy within myself. Meenalda has often been accused of being so didactic and the political message so strong almost at the sacrifice of art. He's been accused of that. And I think that's really for the filmmaker to decide. There are some filmmakers who want to do it in a far more lyrical way and there are some people who want to hit you on the head with it. In his youth particularly, he was up there and he said what he pleased and he said it directly. And so his films were direct. But most certainly they were films. They belonged to the era of filmmakers who believed that art should be used as an instrument for social change and Meenalda did it in the way he thought best. I don't think that he would have made the impact that he did had he not been so forthright in its political consciousness. The whole world was going on differently. The people were doing it differently, they were doing it differently. So in that sense, the people who were involved in it were aware that Meenalda would be accused of being a youth problem. So Meenalda said, go away. Go away and say whatever you want to say that in any acting and experience, we don't have to act in such a way. But the youth problem of our subject matter we have to take care of it. So he said, you are going to be here, you are going to be up there and I will give you a test. You won't be able to do anything. So he took a knife and Meenalda sat in the camera and he asked the camera, go away. I said go away, go away. He laughed and laughed. He laughed and laughed. He laughed and laughed. He laughed and laughed. But it didn't happen. Everyone was talking in front of the camera and I reacted. Go away, go away, go away. It happened, it happened. After a month, when I was selected, it all started. It started exactly what is happening around me. I don't know what's going on. I see a lot of girls. How many girls are there? I don't know, I don't know. When I was older, I was very tired. I was very tired. The reasons for Meenalda's natural alignment with the leftist movement in Bengal lie in his own roots in East Bengal, his migration to Calcutta and of course the Bengal famine of 1943. He understood how a colonial administration that was at war with Japan created and then neglected a famine that eventually killed some three million people. Indeed, this famine was Bengal's holocaust. Murnal Sen is interested in the effect this disaster had on ordinary lives and is an observer in Baish-e-Shawar. Made in the backdrop of the famine during World War II, the film shows how economic and social conditions caused the emotional and psychological destruction of two lives. Sen has said that this was a cruel time and that he wanted to make a cruel film on the time. In Okaalei Shanlani, Sen's outrage, the understanding that the famine need never have happened, is channeled in a very creative manner. It is perhaps his best written film about a movie crew that comes to a village in 1980 to make a movie about the 1943 famine. But as the film crew go about their production work, something very interesting happens. The recreated past becomes a commentary in the present and the entire cast and crew become a part of the feudal structure of the village. While searching for a movie and famine, they replicate the very systems of hierarchy and exploitation that compounded the famine of 1943. Renal Sen is an actors director here with a cast running into dozens. He gives every performer distinct persona, who despite not being a Bengali, merges naturally into the film. As his career progressed, Sen emerges as a truly pan Indian director, switching languages effortlessly and directing a whole range of actors. Shabanaasmi has perhaps given two of her finest performances as Sen in Ek Dinachanak and in Khandahar. I've bestowed Renal to cast me in his film. I threatened to do a moorcha outside his house and sit in hunger strike until and unless he cast me in a film. And he used to think that I was joking but I'm sure that he was also very pleased because I think for an actor, for a director, it's nice that there's an actor who's so keen to work with you. And finally when he offered me Khandar, I remember the huge impact the film had on me in that little 20-minute innovation. And when I saw the complete film, I was stunned how he had managed to encapsulate the very essence of those 20 minutes in the feature film. When I look back at my career of almost 40 years, I think the one performance that stands out is the one in which I've made the least number of mistakes. It's that of Germany in Khandar. And I owe that performance entirely to Meenalda. You know, people know Meenalda as a very garrulous, very outward person. Actually inside him is also a very shy, very contained, very gentle person. I'm really fortunate that I worked with Meenalda in that phase of his because whether you look at Khandar or you look at Genesis or you look at it in Achanas, it was in the era when Meenalda was also rediscovering himself. I think Meenalda was struggling with his own identity and questioning himself and asking whether he was mediocre. I think that's a very courageous thing for an artist to do, to be able to apply that lens through which you see the world also to yourself and say that you are not above question. In Antarin, he directed a Hindi movie star, Dimple Kapadia, in a story by Sadat Hasan Manto. The film is about a lonely woman and a writer who develop a relationship over a telephonic conversation that he've never met. She is in an unhappy marriage and he is looking for creative inspiration. What are you saying? No, no. But what do you want? I... I want to tell you something. Finally, they do meet on a train. Their lives intersect for a brief moment. Then they are alone again. I can't see you well. Me? Me? Can you tell me? Hasan. Hasan. He realizes how lonely he actually is. When he returns to his post, he is a more compassionate man. He is my life. It's hard for him to cut it. Really? I didn't know that. But how can Pankhi and Saadbhaji be? If you cut Pankhi, he gets upset, but Saadbhaji doesn't get upset or upset. Do you like Pankhi very much? Of course. Then why do you complain? You have given me a beating. Isn't there a cut-mer in it? A cut-mer? No. It would have been better if you had done it. I made a film which accidentally became an artistic success, according to the people, and which also accidentally became a money spinner. That was Bhuvansham. When we made it, we already decided, we were convinced that the film will not run for more than a day, but it did enormously. And then a number of producers came to me, very big producers from Bombay came to Calcutta. I remember three of them. They came to Calcutta at the same time. They were staying in big hotels. They waited for me, and they wanted me to make films like Bhuvansham. I said, what do you do? I can't do that kind of film. I don't know what I will be doing. I will allow me to make my kind of films. When I was making this film, it was hardly... I had to wait 10 years to convince any producer to put in money for this film, and for Bhuvansham. Bhuvansham, I didn't get anybody. Then finally, what did I do? I applied to the FFC, Film Finance Corporation, asked for Rs.1,50,000, and I made the film. It is always the establishment which is trying to impress upon the people that filmmaking is an expensive proposition, highly expensive proposition. It is our business, our job, nobody else's business. But we are here to say filmmaking is not as expensive as they think it is. Just as he satirizes the post-colonial ruling classes, send us a wicked satire on the Bengali middle class morality enacting Pratidin. A woman in Calcutta doesn't come home from work one evening. She is the breadwinner of the family. The family first starts worrying, then panicking, and finally reporting the matter to the police. The neighbor's gossip. The landlord wants to throw the family out. Finally, the woman does come home late at night. But instead of relief, there are whispers about her character. Sen never reveals where she has been. It doesn't really matter. The film is a bitter comment on attitudes of women and the hypocrisy of society. Not only do women got so angry, but they were also a little understated. I was so afraid. They felt so lucky for me. I couldn't resist talking about the day I was leaving. I was very stressed. My words were too harsh. I was very upset. I was confused about it and felt sorry for myself. Murnal Sen shows an intuitive and present understanding of the position of women in society. In Podathik, there is an entire sequence of women activists talking of how feminism is political and how the women's movement would be meaningless without a complete overall of the patriarchal and feudal structures. Murnal Sen has been among the pioneers of the Indian new wave cinema of the 1970s and 80s. Not only did his films break off from mainstream Indian cinema at the time, taking a critical look at many aspects of Indian society. But they were also avant-garde in their presentation in cinematic language, particularly in the Calcutta trilogy. Sen is Godadian, using freeze frames, jump cuts and handheld camera movements and basing his transitions and ideas rather than linear narratives. He was truly new wave in the political sense we understand the term French new wave. There was no interview at all. I had a sequence of women in a pocket and I had to go to the police station to see if there was anything wrong. Murnal Sen had a dialogue with him and he was serious about it. Some people seriously say that we can't laugh at jokes. I get confused between these two. I get confused. And in shooting, we hear dialogue. When we repeat, we say, there's no dialogue. You need to answer the question. So, you just keep saying one thing. We keep saying in lines. You just keep saying one thing. Never. The way you should have walked from here. The way you should have walked. When you go to the police station, there is an interview at 3 pm and there is a dead body here. If the police are scared of you, they will kill you. So you have to wait for the interview at 3 pm. You have to go to the police station and talk to the police. And the police will come and ask you if you want to go. They will come and talk to you. I told him like that. Yes, I said this. Today you should speak happily. I told him to speak happy, so he was really cool. When he went to the club, did he meet anyone at school? From school to school, I was responsible for the education. He spoke happily. But I didn't understand anything. I didn't believe it. But I understood it completely. I understood it completely when I saw it for the first time. When I saw the dialogue, the sound, the lip. That was the best part. I didn't know where to go. I didn't know where to go. It's called montage. It's called montage. I saw the combination of Dhoot, I saw the dialogue, I didn't know where to go. That's because it's unforgettable. Unforgettable. I need films which have not been made before. Okay? I need films where I can make the fullest, most intimate use of the visual and the word. When we came to cinema, we were told that cinema, in cinema you have to incidents. One incident giving rise to another. That to another and that to another. How a full story is told. That is how a full, entire film is made. But right from the beginning, I wanted to go in for de-emphasizing the plots and the incidents. Depending more on feelings, something like this. What is the relevance of any piece of art? What is the relevance of a painting, or a film, or a poem, or a dance? The relevance is that art has the possibility to create a climate of sensitivity in which it is possible for change to occur. Minal Sen will continue to be relevant. Not because he spoke only of those times, but he spoke in a way that was universal. And it's a sad fact that the issues that he's raised in his films continue to haunt us even today. Not only in India, but in the world. Every film of Minal Sen, certainly in aesthetic terms, produces a coherent argument and leads to an animated discussion amongst viewers. The longevity of his films rests on that and his reputation continues to grow.