This year marks a century of Indian film making. For one hundred years, India has been creating unique, epoch making works of cinematic art, spawning globally celebrated masters of film both in front of and behind the camera- but the most important of all was Dadasaheb Phalke (The Father of Indian Cinema)
Born in India in 1870, he was responsible for what would come to be known as the nation’s first full-length feature, ‘Raja Harishchandra’, in 1913. Inspired by a screening of silent epic The Life of Christ, he set about bringing the gods of India to the big screen.
In total he made 95 movies and 26 short films, over the course of a career that spanned 19 years. He was also responsible for the renowned works ‘Mohini Bhasmasur’ (1913), ‘Satyavan Savitri’ (1914), ‘Lanka Dahan’ (1917), ‘Shri Krishna Janma’ (1918) and ‘Kaliya Mardan’.
Although the advent of the talkie saw Phalke driven into eventual obscurity, in modern times he has come to be recognized as a creative pioneer. India’s most prestigious cinema award bears his name, and his life and career themselves have been documented in film. His outrageous imagination and artistic flair continue to inspire creatives today. Most notably in recent years, Kamal Sawroop, who this year is releasing the Phalke Chronofiles.
Consisting of 200 pages of collaged text, Sawroop hopes his work will be, “a milestone in my journey of tracing, excavating, moulding the life and the times of Dadasaheb Phalke.”
The project began, almost by accident, in 1990. Sawroop was trying to make a film about Phalke which would examine the process of growth and ageing within a man’s lifetime. He set about making a chronofile of the life of Phalke, spanning the full 74 years of the director’s life, typing out the main events of his life year by year on one side of the page, and out the events happening in technology and elsewhere on the other.
During the process of documenting the aging of Phalke, Sawoop states that the noticed “a similiar kind of an ageing process happening in the life outside and around him”. After making the final edits to his manuscript, he began travelling all over the city,explaining “ looking for Xeroxing and supplementing the text with associative and supporting images from various visual sources – newspapers, magazines, books, art catalogues. I moved with a pair of scissors and a bottle of gum always in my hand. I cut out and pasted those images along the manually typed text on the pages. You could call this activity a premonition of the internet time”.
Through use of found materials, historical references, national history and the history of image making technology, Sawroop succeeds in taking the viewer on an emotive and evocative journey through the development of an art form, and the nation where it was born. It is at once a study in beauty and the power of collective consciousness to empower creativity.
[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6FuYf7r46Y[/youtube]
Raja Harishchandra- 1913- India’s First Silent Film- FULL FOOTAGE
