Snippets on Cinema 1: Meghe Dhaka Tara

Finally watched Kamaleshwar Mukherjee's Meghe Dhaka Tara. A lot has been written on it; I would simply like to make one point.

I think the film contains an extremely dangerous portrait of Ritwik Ghatak as an artist because wittingly or unwittingly it ends up showing his cinema and his entire aesthetic practice as an extension of his clinical condition of depression. To centre his biopic on the mental hospital phase is one thing and to depict his entire thinking, the cinematic included, as an outward projection of his delusions is another!

It is such an unfair, diluted, if not outright stupid portrayal of the great director and the aesthete.

Let me clarify again to avoid confusion that I have nothing against the conception of 'psychic cinema' vis a vis Ghatak because one can find grounds for this kind of take in his case but what I fiercely oppose is the film's propensity to locate his cinematic flair entirely within the delusional structure of his clinical depression.

It's high time we get out of this inane stereotyping in which Ritwik Ghatak as a mad drunkard scores over the great creator he is, just like Binay Majumdar whose poetic self still remains secondary to his identity as someone's jilted lover gone mad!